#happy 1yr anniversary to the jahai bluffs release I'm still not over it

[fivebrights]

The Convergence of Sorrow: Memorial

The Brand takes Vemyen from Ziya. It also offers her the chance to make amends. Based on the Branded djinn/Elegy side story in Jahai Bluffs; Vemyen/Ziya, PG-13, 4.3k words.

“This is how they find themselves, sooner or later. The luxury of rivalry they save for better years; these are dark times.”

---

“Vemyen’s late. To his own emancipation.”

The djinn of the estate are gathered in the courtyard, numbering a half dozen. They look at one another. 

“You don’t have to wait for him, Ziya,” one points out.

“Hmph,” Ziya folds her arms; first one set, then the other. “If someone doesn’t wait for him, he may not even realize he’s free from these humans.”

Several of them shrug.

“Give him our regards,” says another. One by one, the djinn vanish into the ether. To freedom. 

Ziya waits in the courtyard alone, tapping her fingers against her arm, until a man steps out of the house. Ziya’s impatience spikes. She vanishes before she can be questioned.

She continues unseen around the house. And there’s Vemyen, sitting placidly in the yard among some young humans - the children of the masters plus a few of their playmates - reading a book aloud while his other hands busily knit.

Ziya’s anger flares. She reappears. 

“Vemyen,” she says. “How much longer were you going to keep me waiting?”

“Ziya,” says Vemyen, surprised. He glances around at the children, puts down his things, and rises. “Excuse me,” he says to them.

“‘Excuse me?’” Ziya repeats, aghast. She turns as he passes. “‘Excuse me?’”

Vemyen beckons to her. He is finally leaving these humans, but now Ziya doesn’t follow.

“What are you doing? Why are you being polite to them?” she asks, loudly.

“Ziya, please,” he says. He takes her by the wrist. “Let’s speak elsewhere.”

The young humans stare after them. One asks where they’re going. 

“Not far,” Vemyen tells them. “It’ll just be a moment.”

Together the djinn vanish from human eyes and reconvene in the small cultivated oasis that is the garden. Here there is the respite of Ziya’s element, and a lack of eavesdroppers, but she does not feel more at ease.

She pulls out of Vemyen’s already-loose grip against the part of her that warns her not to let go. “You’re not under any obligation to lie to them now,” she says, irritably.

“Nor to tell the truth,” Vemyen responds, “but I have chosen to.”

Ziya points to his broken shackles. “You’re free,” she says.

Vemyen watches her carefully. “Yes,” he says. “I’m free.”

“Then it’s time to leave,” she emphasizes. She feels like she’s explaining this to one of the children.

“I may,” says Vemyen, “in time. But I’m fine here now, Ziya. There’s no need to wait for me.”

She gapes at him. “What have these humans done to you? Wanting to stay--that’s a symptom of something.”

“Of freedom,” he says. “Ziya, let me choose.”

“How is it even a choice?” she demands. “Until yesterday, these were our captors. We suffered under them, Vemyen!” 

“I know,” he says. “But I’m willing to forgive them.”

Something bitter rises through Ziya’s stomach and into her throat and then into her head.

“Then you’ve forgiven what they’ve done to me,” she snarls, and teleports away before she can see or hear his response. 

She doesn’t forgive them, and she’s not sure she can forgive Vemyen, either.

---

Ziya leaves Vemyen, her entire essence consumed with rage. This was supposed to be a day of celebration, and Vemyen has ruined it.

She thinks Vemyen just needs time, but nothing changes. His fascination with humans is unabated, and he stays in their company. He assures her that he still has no attachment to any particular place or person. He still insists he’s free.

No reasoning, pleading, or ransoming moves him. No amount of pestering or leaving him alone changes his mind. 

Ziya tears up Vemyen’s books, pulls apart his yarns, uproots his flowers, throws away his coins, shouts at him for being a traitor. 

She betrays him for his own good.

Ziya takes care when she chooses the bottle she traps him in. Something not so ornate that someone would be tempted to pick it up, something not so plain that someone would be careless enough to break it. 

Something easy to overlook. Something cramped and a little crooked, so Vemyen would remember he wasn’t there to be comfortable.

Ziya hates how calm Vemyen’s voice sounds when it later emerges from the bottle, how it stands above the anger and urgency that are also in his tone. She hates how he asks her to think about what she’s doing.

“I’ve thought about it plenty,” she snaps, and then corks the bottle.

She goes to a cave and buries him there. Then she floods it, just to be sure.

She wanders the valleys and weeps until dawn, now that Vemyen has no way of witnessing it. 

---

Not that she has any reason to feel guilty, she decides. Ziya almost forgets about him, even, until war comes. Then word spreads of three djinn protecting humans and centaurs under one of the largest trees in the desert.

Foolishness doesn’t die, Ziya scornfully thinks. 

She has too much pride to press for details or to see for herself. But a suspicion comes to her and won’t leave, and for the first time she returns to the cave where Vemyen is buried.

The floodwaters have long since receded, and parts of the cave have been disturbed. This Ziya expects, after nearly three centuries. Even so, she checks for Vemyen’s bottle. For her own peace of mind. 

The earth is damp and not difficult to pull away. There is some rock, too, but Ziya digs around it. But where she expects to touch Vemyen’s vessel there is nothing. She frowns and digs around a little more, although she has no reason to doubt her memory.

Ziya floats up to the cave’s ceiling, flicking dirt out from under her nails, studying the walls of the cave. They are all familiar, more or less as she left them. This is not one of the places that has been so touched by the movement of the world. 

Ziya goes still, as if the realization approaching her might pass by like an oblivious predator if she simply doesn’t move. It does not. Panic fills her, and then rage, and her shouted curse roars like a waterfall.

She knows exactly where to find him.

---

Vemyen is beneath the Ancestor Tree, and he is alone, although Ziya can see humans toiling in the fields some distance away. Vemyen looks well; certainly none the worse for wear after centuries of imprisonment. Ziya can’t decide whether that’s a relief or just infuriating. 

She pushes aside her fear that Vemyen may have not forgiven her and materializes directly in front of him.

“Vemyen! How did you get out?” she demands.

Vemyen looks up calmly, as if he’s been expecting her or known she’s been there all along. But Ziya knows him well enough to catch the guarded ripple that swirls among the molten patterns of his skin. 

“Hello again, Ziya.”

Ziya wants to savor his caution, the tacit acknowledgement of the possibility she could bottle him again. Instead, she just feels even more irritable.

“All these hundreds of years, but you still haven’t learned, have you,” she scowls. 

Vemyen gazes out across the fields towards the humans. “And neither have you.”

Ziya wants to scream. All of her suffering, all of this time apart, and still—

“You’re welcome to stay,” Vemyen says, still without looking at her.

“I don’t need your permission,” Ziya retorts, and after a pause long enough to sate her pride she haughtily settles down underneath the tree’s magnificent boughs. 

For a time there is no conversation between them. Ziya has little interest in watching the humans, so she side-eyes Vemyen instead. Vemyen has no knitting with him today, no books--he seems content to just watch the life that is unfolding around the tree. 

Ziya looks up. She thinks about the water it must’ve taken to produce the Ancestor Tree’s strong roots, thick trunk, and wide branches. As her gaze travels back down, she notices two machetes leaning against the tree, too large for human hands. The blades aren’t particularly polished and there are nicks in them. They can only have been used to defend what Vemyen loves.

“How have you been?” 

It’s Vemyen who asks. To Ziya it’s too friendly, too banal, too clueless of a question for the painful interim of his absence. 

“Just fine,” she says, shortly.

Vemyen finally looks at her again. Then, to Ziya’s surprise, he comes closer - close enough for the tattered edges of their sarongs to brush one another - and cups two hands over one of her shackles.

“You still wear these,” Vemyen says. “I’m surprised.”

“So I don’t forget what the humans did to us,” Ziya growls. “And to remind them that I am a free djinn.”

“I have thought about removing my own,” Vemyen admits. “Although it is easier said than done. I don’t suppose you would help me.”

Something in Ziya’s chest stutters. “No. Get one of the humans to help you.”

Vemyen strokes his thumbs over the shackle. “I wish I could unbind you from your hatred.”

Ziya finally pulls her hands away, rubbing her wrist above the shackle. “I don’t,” she snaps.

“Ziya.”

“How can you prefer humans over us?”

He looks at her critically. “You still want me to choose a side.”

She looks away in disgust, still rubbing her wrist. Vemyen’s hands slide away from her and into his lap. When Ziya looks back, he is once more watching the humans till the land’s sparse and arid fields.

“I just don’t see what’s so special about humans,” Ziya mutters, trying to keep her temper in check.

“They’re so…fleeting,” Vemyen says, and there’s a wistfulness to him. “There’s so little time to get to know a human soul.”

Ziya thinks of all the human lifetimes Vemyen missed inside that bottle. The people he may have known before he disappeared without a word or a trace. All dirt and dust and bone powder now, their lives marked with little piles of stones or splintered stakes of wood.

“I’m not going to apologize,” she says, stubbornly. She finally lets go of her wrist and shakes out her hands, and the chains jostle and chime together in soft, discordant notes.

“That’s all right, Ziya.”

Ziya glares. “You should be more upset,” she accuses. 

Vemyen smiles at her, and then he says something that Ziya finds very strange.

“It’s funny,” he muses. “Not long ago, an outlander came to me and said you would come to regret your treatment of me.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ziya scoffs. And truly, she doesn’t. What outlander?

“You don’t need to. I know when you’re feeling sorry.”

Ziya grimaces. Then Vemyen gives her the kind of look he gives when he needs her to understand something. 

“No,” Ziya begins to say, but then he reaches out and touches her bandaged lips. The reverence with which he does it makes her realize that this is not a gesture to quiet her.

“Ziya,” he says.

The longing in Vemyen’s voice breaks open the dam of Ziya’s own loneliness. She grips his arms, stunned.

“You can’t care for me and for humans,” she blurts.

“Ziya.” His fingers fall from her lips. It’s all the prompting Ziya needs. Her other hands frantically pull the bandages from her mouth and then Vemyen’s. 

She arches herself against Vemyen and another welcoming gasp of her name floods from him. She claws at his hollowed cheeks and frantically kisses along his jaw, unwilling to interrupt his mantra of hummed “zee”s and breathy “ahs.” His hands dig into her, a hot anchor.

She is taking him back, she thinks. Taking him back with his precious humans not far away. The feeling is sweet.

---

When Vemyen eventually asks her to return his things, Ziya doesn’t know why it stings, but it does. 

She grants his request. She leads him to where she has kept all the items she has taken from him over the years, tells him to take everything and get out. 

Years on she finds herself kissing Vemyen on a bed of all those returned things: among the coins, the pressed flowers, the journals, the unspooled yarns. 

This is how they find themselves, sooner or later. The luxury of rivalry they save for better years; these are dark times.

“Ziya,” Vemyen sighs into her ear. “Touch me.”

“Hmph,” says Ziya. She props herself up with two arms, and her other hands stroke his face and hip. “Better me than a human.” 

Her own words plant an ugly seed in her head. She stares down at him. “Have you ever allowed a human to touch you?”

Vemyen’s molten skin ripples. “Ziya. I am not enjoyable to the touch.”

“That’s what you think.”

She knows what he likes. She squeezes his hip until the steam rises from it while the fingers of her other hand curl along the side of his jaw. His skin ripples again, this time in relaxation. He groans softly. 

“I’ve taken one of your rings,” Ziya tells him, a bit smugly. “As a souvenir.”

Another squeeze distracts Vemyen. He groans again. “Which one?”

“You’ll have to figure that out.”

“Hmm.”

Ziya grasps the fabric that cascades through the metal loop of Vemyen’s garment. She runs her hands through the fabric a few times, then yanks him closer.

“Ziya,” Vemyen sighs again, and the rapture in his voice quiets her jealousy.

---

“Ziya,” Vemyen gasps, but this time his voice is mangled with agony. 

What is here, hidden away in a cave deep in the Brand, is no longer a fire djinn. Vemyen’s skin has crystallized, and his veins are shot through with violet lightning. Even his voice is corrupted; when he speaks it sounds like shattered glass.

“Look at me,” he rasps. “Open your eyes.”

Ziya thinks he’s pretending. Hadn’t he pretended that he was going to come with her when they were released from servitude? Hadn’t he been pretending, for all these centuries, that he was free when he stayed by the side of humans?  

“A convincing illusion,” she sneers. “You want me to pity you.”

With a shout, Vemyen barrels right into her, forcing her out of her shield and to the ground. The defense dissipates.

The two hands not holding swords drag Ziya up until she’s inches away from Vemyen’s face. His head is impaled with Brand crystals. How is he even alive? 

Ziya sees her own fear reflected in Vemyen’s eyes. 

“Ziya…” The breaths Vemyen takes are jagged. “Don’t...linger. The Brand...makes me--”

“You let yourself be shackled again,” she retorts, frantically trying to think of a way to somehow get them both out of this mess, “and this time by a dragon. Shame on you, Vemyen!”

“I’m going to kill you, Ziya,” he rasps, but it’s the thrum of grief in it that chills Ziya more than his certainty. 

He’s still holding her. He raises his swords.

Instinct overrides hesitation. Ziya blasts him backwards. He rolls in the air, rights himself, and slams both of his swords to the ground.

Crystal erupts from the earth. Ziya spins upward, but then Vemyen barrels into her again. The impact sends her crashing back to the ground.

“Vemyen,” she groans, on her back.

“Ziya…Ziya,” Vemyen’s voice rattles over her. His swords come down on either side of her head. He leans on their hilts, struggling within the grasp of the Brand. “Defend yourself!”

“What else do you think I’m trying to do?” she snarls back.

“You’re trying-- to help!” He yanks the swords free and raises them once more. “There’s nothing more you can do here. Accept it!”

She was always stronger, faster, smarter. The only thing that had kept Vemyen sharp at all was his willingness to defend others in times of crisis. But the Brand has done things to him she cannot know, and before Ziya can get out from under him he drives the rusty, jagged blades into her. 

She screams. The creatures of the Brand howl in response, and with their voices is Vemyen’s. 

---

The outlander arrives then, a half dozen allies at their side. Ziya can’t tell if the distraction momentarily brings Vemyen back to his senses or if it’s just instinct that makes him switch targets, but he pulls the swords from her and defensively crosses them in front of himself as a barrage of spells and weapons fall upon him. Ziya teleports a short distance away, survival instinct making her mobile against the agony of being run through. 

Vemyen’s swords - those machetes that leaned against the Ancestor Tree so long ago - are uncorrupted by the Brand, and it’s Ziya’s saving grace; she’s badly wounded, but she feels no crystal corruption spreading through her body. 

The outlander is fighting as Kralkatorrik’s fury comes down around them. Ziya lets her form unravel once more, putting what little she has left into a Brand shield while the outlander and their companions command Vemyen’s attention--darting, parrying, and sometimes stumbling out of the way. 

“Begone!” Vemyen shouts raggedly at them. “Leave me to my fate!” 

Vemyen brings his swords down on the outlanders in a mighty swing, but they do not make contact. Instead the blades drive into the earth, so deeply that Vemyen is forced to abandon them with a roar of frustration.

He flees then, but not far: the Brand turns his ties to the land into chains. Ziya sees the corrupted magic streaming from the shackles that Vemyen, like her, never fully removed. They feed into large, resonating crystals that buzz and claw at the very ether she is made of.

“There’s a resonance!” she calls out, and armed with that knowledge, the outlander hero shatters the crystals. 

Vemyen collapses. To Ziya’s relief, the outlander and their companions don’t try to land a killing blow. She hastily pulls herself out of her shield and comes to his side, ignoring the deep ache of her own closing wounds. 

Vemyen is hunched over, still heaving jagged breaths, his fingers clutching the corrupted land beneath him. She can see in his silhouette that his form disintegrating; he is already slipping away.

Djinn aren’t supposed to be Branded, Ziya thinks in disbelief. Vemyen’s not supposed to be dying.

“Ziya…Ziya…” Despite it all, no one has ever said her name as much and as fondly as Vemyen has. Now it will be the last time. “You always were the clever one.”

“About time you admitted it.” Smugness keeps the grief at bay, if only for a moment. 

“Take the staff,” Vemyen rasps, weakly gesturing toward the cave he had hidden himself in. “Keep the ring. Thank you….”

Then he convulses, hideously, and crumples. Within moments he is nothing but a scattering of purple sand.

“No, wait!” Ziya stammers. “You can’t do that! You’re not supposed to… We’re not supposed to….”

She sinks down and closes her hand around what remains. “Vemyen….”

Ziya can feel the sympathy radiating from the outlander. She doesn’t want them to see her grief; she lets her palm open, composes herself, accepts their invitation to Sun’s Refuge. The grim determination that fills her is one she hasn’t felt since she was convinced Vemyen would leave the humans for her.

Ziya throws herself into her work, sometimes literally--pushing herself into her shield, trying to find ways to imbue her resistance to the Brand in the sands the outlander has brought back for her from across the Crystal Desert. She keeps Vemyen’s old, tarnished ring on her finger.

Ziya loses track of time. At some point, the outlander comes by and asks some strange questions about Vemyen. To honor his memory, she tells them. Sharing Vemyen’s story is not as painful as she had anticipated it would be, but as soon as the outlander leaves again Ziya is quick to immerse herself once more in her work, letting its complications and intricacies consume her every thought and waking hour. 

The Refuge is safe, but it’s busier and more claustrophobic than Ziya’s used to. When she hits an impasse with her work, she ventures out into the Bluffs to ruminate on solutions, watchful for the Branded rifts that sometimes arrive as suddenly as a squall. 

She wanders the paths to the north of Vanta Pass, often taking the road up through the ruins, other times choosing to head eastward until the path reconnects with the main road that threads its way back to Yatendi Village. 

Today, a convoy of soldiers and machinery are marching up the road, and Kralktorrik’s forces are responding in fierce numbers. Ziya watches at a distance, deciding whether or not to intervene in the chaos of crystal and spells and gunfire. She made a promise to Vemyen, but that’s no use if she too winds up Branded or dead.

And so it relieves Ziya to see the outlander’s forces clear a path through the Branded and continue their push towards the staging grounds, but she decides against following in their wake; she needs peace and quiet to think. She considers the path back to Sun’s Refuge, and then the one that leads to the Ancestor Tree.

She has been avoiding the Ancestor Tree. It’s not the memories that keep her away, Ziya tells herself; something about the magic around it feels eerie and menacing. She doesn’t trust it, and so when she approaches the unnatural dome of magic surrounding the Tree, she stays a safe distance. 

Until, between the shimmer of the magic surrounding the area, Ziya is certain she sees Vemyen. Vemyen, as he was: uncorrupted and whole.

---

Vemyen is beneath the Ancestor Tree. Before Ziya can announce her presence he looks up, as if he’s been expecting her or known she’s been there all along. “Hello again, Ziya.”

“Vemyen,” Ziya says, feeling strangely at a loss for words. She feels disoriented and isn’t quite sure why.

Vemyen says nothing after his initial greeting, resuming his watch over the humans Ziya can distantly see working the fields. She settles down next to him underneath the Tree’s boughs without waiting for an invitation.

For a time there is no conversation between them, and together they watch the humans toil. From this distance Ziya can’t see the details of their features, but they are distinct in the way they move. Several stoop low, large baskets on their backs. One carries a child in a sling. Another pushes forward dolyaks, tilling the fields. 

When Ziya takes her eyes away, she notices Vemyen has stopped watching them to watch her. He is smiling in that semi-private way he does. 

“Fine,” Ziya snaps. “They’re possibly a little interesting. Maybe.”

Vemyen folds his hands neatly in his lap. “It’s funny,” he muses. “Not long ago, a strange outlander came to me and said you would come to regret your treatment of me.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ziya scoffs, but something about what he says sounds familiar. “I haven’t spoken to any outlander,” she adds, to clear up her own confusion, but it feels wrong somehow.

“And yet here you are. You even have my ring.” 

Ziya rubs where the ring rests on her finger. It feels strange there. Why is she wearing it now and when did she take it from him? She can’t remember.

“I never said I was going to give it to you,” she deflects. “Maybe I’m just here to taunt you a little more.”

Vemyen looks out across the fields again. “They’re so…fleeting,” he says. “There’s so little time to get to know a human soul.”

The bandages across Vemyen’s mouth tighten as he smiles then, though the look in his eyes remains solemn. “I take you for granted, Ziya.”

The admission startles Ziya, but she hides it. 

“You most certainly do,” she huffs. “But I’ll admit it goes both ways.”

She doesn’t know what provokes her to say that, and Vemyen looks at her, also surprised. Then his brow furrows.

“What?” Ziya grumbles.

“Ziya,” Vemyen lays a hand over hers. Time fractures around him. “Did something happen?”

---

The unpleasant hum of the Brand fills Ziya’s ears. Vemyen is gone, and she is alone under the Ancestor Tree.

Except she is not really alone--the Branded are converging on this place, and quickly. The air is laced with violet electricity. 

Ziya’s confusion fades. She can’t stay. She flees, and when teleportation fails her she carves through the Branded in her path with sweeps of summoned ice.

Ziya returns to Sun’s Refuge, and where there was once anger, out there under the tree so many centuries ago, there is now only a deep sorrow. 

She can’t give Vemyen back the years she stole when she trapped him in the bottle. She can only return to the Ancestor Tree--to what she comes to know is just a looping moment in time.

Ziya kisses her apologies to Vemyen when she visits, presses into his hands a few items she’d secretly never returned. She ignores his curiosity and deflects his confusion. She tries to impress herself onto Vemyen so deeply he’ll remember all of this in the future that’s already come to pass.

Ziya reminds herself that it’s not even Vemyen, just an echo of him. But he feels real, sounds real. He knows her. The visits are never a perfect repeat, and it’s what draws Ziya back, time and time again. 

She fears exhausting all the possibilities, but she fears more that she’ll miss something if she doesn’t.

“I forgive you,” Ziya says abruptly. It’s maybe the second time she’s done so, of all the times she’s visited. And this time, Vemyen responds with more than just a look. 

“You don’t need to forgive me, Ziya,” he says.

Ziya is taken aback, and then indignant. She opens her mouth to demand what he means by that.

“But thank you,” Vemyen says, “for understanding.”

His sincerity quiets Ziya. Together, they watch the humans in the fields until the moment fades. Then Ziya returns home to the Refuge once more, outpacing the Branded that encroach upon the tree every cycle, and begins her work on her memorial to Vemyen anew.