#izzie nenelori

[witchfall]

Spoiler embargo is up so I'd like to thank square enix for recognizing whatever the hell is going on between them

[the-firetouched]

And there’s a dazzling haze, 

a mysterious way about you, dear

Have I known you twenty seconds or twenty years?

—-

((thank you @dancing-edge for the pics with the actual good lighting in this set lmao))

[witchfall]

I AM FREE OF YOU ZETA QUESTS!!!!!

Izzie's canon bow is now REAL...thank you to Stone Vigil for making this an unusually easy grind thanks to being on Light bonus.

[witchfall]

go on, let it fall [1]

[jullus pyr norbanus/Warrior of Light/Alphinaud Leveilleur]

[~5550 words]

Jullus meets the Warriors of Light.

Not that he knew that, then; perhaps, if he had, this would have ended so much differently.

---

Jullus peels off his gloves to check for frostbite, breath falling out of his mouth in heavy, watery clouds.

Does he remember how to move his fingers? Yes — for a small mercy, the synapses between brain and finger are preserved. But numbness filters upstream, from his fingers to his wrists, and it blots his mind in fear, even though he knows, logically…

He knows it is not frostbite and he knows it is not magic and he knows it is not some new, terrible virus wrought to give them ignoble deaths piled in their own fluids.

(The men won’t shut the fuck up.)

It’s because he is having a panic attack and cannot breathe.

Atticus, one of the infantrymen, presses a lit cigarette into his hand and gestures vaguely at him. Take it. They lack supplies and heat but they still have cigarettes, for some reason, maybe because only now did discipline die, replaced instead with animal instinct to just get through the moment.

Moment by moment, they become exactly what they’re trying to defeat.

Maybe his thoughts can be seen on his face, because Publius, on his other side, suddenly says, “It’s just a cigarette, man. It didn’t insult your—”

It didn’t insult your mother, goes the rest of that saying, and Publius wisely clicks his mouth shut before he finishes it — but it does make Jullus put the end of the thing in his mouth to avoid replying.

Tastes fucking bad, dry as the ash falling out of the sky, and when he breathes it in his body nearly bends itself in two from how badly his lungs reject the coarse smoke. He coughs horribly, raucously, and finds breathing a sharp, thin thing. The panic of real physical danger, however, seems to short circuit whatever chemical re-creation his body had decided to manufacture, and when he can finally breathe — when the men around him stop smirking — he realizes he hasn’t thought about his hands in a few minutes.

“I’m going on patrol,” Jullus announces, giving the cigarette back. It’s his turn soon, anyway, and lingering leads to chemical imbalance. “I’ll…try to find…more than this.”

The men watch him like he just announced he was diagnosed with a terminal illness — obliging of his earnestness, even though they know it will be the death of him.

[read on ao3.]

[witchfall]

go on, let it fall [2]

[jullus pyr norbanus/Warrior of Light/Alphinaud Leveilleur] [~6000 words]

He cannot even explain such a thing to his worst enemy. Because she is not his worst enemy, is she? She did not do this. She was not here. And if she didn’t do it, then who is there left to scream at?

---

“How the fuck did you manage that, Norbanus?”

Caeso nods at the Warrior of Light, conversing quietly with the twins. Alphinaud shakes his head, starlight braid sweeping over his back, while Alisaie crosses her arms and lets her head fall back, eyes shut. They wear little silver accessories, matching. Their coats are even in the same shape. Do they prefer it that way? To be so…singular?

“What do you mean?” Jullus asks.

“What is she like?”

Jullus’s fists dig into his hips, hard. “Go talk to her if you care to know.”

Caeso rolls his brows — up then down, as if testing the concept of it and finding it hard to read the results. “I…don’t think she’d like that.”

Jullus has been trying very hard not to look in her direction, so instead he focuses on Caeso’s furrowed forehead, how his pale hair sticks to it with frozen sweat. He’s trying to engineer them a way out of this. Jullus is not sure one exists.

Caeso crosses his arms over his chest. “Why didn’t they just…”

“...kill me?”

Caeso watches Jullus. The past jolts forward into the present like brakes sparking on the tracks, and the fear is much the same — a panicked wondering at too close a call. Caeso asks a question in a low voice. “What does it mean that they didn’t?”

The hair on the back of Jullus’s neck rises and burns. He knows the…the girl is looking at him, and he cannot look back. “You needed better wiring, right?” Jullus asks.

“...Jullus.”

“No,” he says, fast, sharp, a sword swinging. “I’m not talking about it.”

“About what?”

Jullus shakes his head and walks away. He keeps his back to the Warrior of Light. I’m not afraid of you, he insists. He is but a cog in this great machine, one that clings to life with rusty screws and old ceruleum but clings nonetheless, and a cog doesn’t fear, nor does it have to understand. If he doesn’t look her in her wet eyes, maybe he will forget the thudding of his swollen heart.

[read on ao3]

[witchfall]

Well, it's a long way out to reach the sea

But I'm sure I'll find you waiting there for me

-the oh hellos, in memoriam

[thank you @miqoroni once again aaaaaaaa]

[witchfall]

In a happier tomorrow...

(thank you to my dearest most amazing friend @sundaysmermaid on twitter!!!)

[witchfall]

Well, even the great celestial hieroglyphs Are bodies of dust illuminated, and if The heavens can be both sacred and dust Oh, maybe so can the rest of us

(hieroglyphs, the oh hellos)

---

Izzie Nenelori and Noel Kisne, the Warriors of Light and Darkness. The Laughing Moon and the Dancing Sun...and, most of all, best friends turned sisters in the face of the end of the world.

(commission by @kawaiihome! she's amazing!)

[witchfall]

a long way out to reach the sea [3]

[3700~words. Izzie loses her Da at perhaps the worst moment possible for them all -- as if there would ever be a good one.]

i leave you below

ao3 link in the reblogs.

His legs feel like weighted jelly, strangely shaped and moving poorly below him. He remembers, in painful, bright blips, how his household had reacted when the news officially reached them that Grandfather had died. He remembers the rippled pealing of grief — how at first his heart had been empty of reaction, only to feel pain puncture him like a rain of spikes the moment his father had said I’m sorry.

Alisaie had screamed and wailed, a reaction that frightened him. It had unmoored him, to see her so shattered, and in that fear he had smothered his own reaction down unto the lowest, worst pits of himself. He had not, he realizes with stunning agony, ever forgiven her for it.

Will he ever see her again?

[witchfall]

dirt in the wound

4 - healing

[Heavensward-era. After the Ravana fight. Izzie, still coming to terms with the weight of their duties...]

It stings like a bastard, the cut on her cheek.

Pebbles and dirt grime the edges of it; the skin is splayed open from the detritus of crystal crushed under Ravana's spindly, insectoid feet. The slice had been perfectly even, a gift from his terrible blade, until her mortal body plummeted to the ground from the force of it.

The moment is slippery. Her mind doesn't want to find purchase on the pain, burning hot with aether and the taste of blood, but she'd thrown herself forward to shove Noel out of the way of his sword's arc -- and she supposes that must be the culprit for this particular injury.

There are stories for them all, but she'd be damned if she could remember them.

She is ruminating on the nature of this work when the cool touch of magic digs into the sting -- yanking out the infection, pulling together the torn skin like laces in a bodice. She gasps aloud and recoils, because that sure as hells isn't what Noel's magic feels like--

"I'm sorry. I--I apologize, I simply..."

Alphinaud's unusually stuttering voice brings her back down from the rocky climb unto panic.

She glares at him from her perch on a cold stone, because that is easy. That is the known dynamic. Fall back into it, like a dance, and prepare for his pirouette, for his haughty rejoinder about how he wouldn't need to heal her if she wasn't always like this--

He pulls back his gloved hand. His eyes, so beautiful and dark, are wide enough to form their own gravitational pull.

Her glare dies -- shocked into smoothening, her answering expression that of confusion.

"Please." His hand hovers in the air. She watches his long, delicate fingers. "I'm sorry. I normally would leave it to Noel's discretion, of course, but she is still with Ysayle--"

"Ask next time," she grumbles out. Her skin burns with heat. She doesn't know why.

It's not like he's never seen her hurt before. He has, plenty of times. Why does this time feel weird and different? Why does it feel like she did something wrong, in making him look so upset? This is her job. She did her job. She shouldn't feel bad.

"Yes, of course," he says, entirely too quickly. His relief crushes his shoulders down. "Of course, I wasn't thinking. Forgive me."

She closes her eyes as his hand hovers just over her cheek. Barely an ilm away. She could lean in and he would touch her skin -- which is a very weird thought to have. Why is she thinking about that? She shouldn't.

Maybe because, for the first time, he sounds their age instead of like the hoity-toity lordling he pretends to be around these Ishgardians. Around storied personages like the Azure Dragoon, who is pretending not to watch with amusement near a wet boulder.

She winces against the coolness of his aether, not at all like the soothing warm salt water of Noel's cure spells. He's like a river, washing the blood and grime away, eroding the crux of the world with the force of his will. The injury will fade because he demands that it shall.

"Why do you care, anyway?" she asks, before she can stop the words from tumbling out. "It's just a cut."

"It looks painful," he says quietly. "And you needn't scar from such a thing when it is in my capacity to mend it."

She bites her lip. "I...forgot."

She forgot that he can heal.

Because he'd never had to, before. He'd never been in the field with them before. But things are different now. There is no one else to rely upon, save herself, Noel, and him. They are all that is left of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, or at least their warrior contingent, and that reminder kicks the air out of her lungs hard enough that she takes in a sharp breath through her nose.

All that is left. A barely of-age girl with more grit than sense, a barely of-age boy with more brains than wisdom, and a brilliant adult woman broken entirely by grief thanks to that fucking Crystal Tower.

"Sorry," she mutters.

He blinks. "Whatever for?"

She doesn't know. All of it? All of her snapping at him, how he's stuck with her again, how his delicate little lordling body has to drag through the mud with them, how she'd made him worry? "A lot of things," she decides, for the sake of her pride. "But this time for forgetting."

A breathless, choked, single giggle bubbles out of him. Tension snapping. "Quite easy to forgive, I assure you."

His hand lingers in the air for a split second after the chime of his aether fades away. Like he's considering something, and then at the last moment, decides not to.

Instead he says: "Would you like help with your hair?"

Her face flushes hot. Angry, right? What else could it be? Surely nothing else but that. "What's that supposed to mean?"

He is the one that recoils this time. "I just meant...! Well, you tangled it quite severely in your last engagement, I--"

"My hair is fine! Thank you!"

"It has blood and dirt in it!"

"What if I like it that way?"

This. This is more normal. This, somehow, is healing.

She feels a smile pull at her lips as he angrily fumbles a response in turn...a smile that only grows when he finally, finally seems to realize she's fucking with him.

He glares at her, face turning pink -- and she bursts into laughter.

And when he sees her laugh, his confused smile in return is...pleased.

A healing only she can offer him in turn. This is their game. Theirs. And no blade, no gil, no scheming in the night can take that away.

[witchfall]

a long way out to reach the sea [2]

the sound don't carry (ao3 link)

“Don’t you have any idea what fun is, Leveilleur?”

Her words are rounded by a scalding irony — mean and pointy, as is often her way — but she also sounds suspiciously like she’s imparting upon him a matter of life or death.

[witchfall]

We've seen way too many endings by far to get here, but we got here, didn't we?

(Thank you to @miqoroni for these pics my god!)

[witchfall]

Izzie is, as my three year old would say, "a schemer" for pretending to be short next to her 5'6" boyfriend. She is 5'10". Jullus indulges her hanging all over him like a terrible opo-opo.

many thanks to my beautiful friend Sunday for drawing my beloveds after 6.5 gave me food I absolutely did not expect

[witchfall]

down in the dark

confession.

Set post-EW, Izzie and Alphinaud find themselves in incredible trouble. This is what happens when you wait for the perfect moment. You get this, instead: cauterizing wounds and terrors in the dark. Kisses that taste like blood.

(Set in one of Izzie's wolverses, this time as a Viera with another fellow Viera WoL, Noel Kisne. Taken straight from doodle writing with my friend! About six years have passed from the start to ARR to the end of Endwalker, approximately. Izzie is about 2 years older than the twins.)

---

Izzie moves his blood-stained, starlight hair from his forehead and gazes down at him, like she can absorb the very concept of aetheric healing by staring hard enough.

She'd learned the very basics from Raha, but she'd be worthless without a focus, anyway, and Alphinaud's are nowhere to be seen. Not that she could work her mind around those finicky things in a pinch. Not without practice.

She could kill him without meaning to, if she tried.

All because she naively thought...well, he'd always be there anyway, wouldn't he? He or Noel or Raha. She hasn't the patience to be a healer, she always thought. But maybe what she doesn't have is the grit.

"Okay," she says. Her heart is pounding so hard. "Okay. What do we do. We're not supposed to take out stabbed things, I'm pretty sure, but you clearly can't move with it in there." She's rambling aloud. It's the only thing stopping her from lying on the floor and sobbing. "But what if I wrap you tight enough?"

"Might not be enough." He watches the ceiling, though its nothing but murky black beyond their orb of light. "...you're going to have to cauterize it."

Her heart stops beating for a moment. Cauterize. Burn him shut.

She can't. She can't. She can't see him scream in pain because of her. What if it didn't work? What if it was for nothing and her last vision of him was him passing out from pain and then promptly bleeding out? What kind of person would that make her? She might as well just throw herself from the edge of Azys Lla.

"Okay," she says, voice lifeless. "I'll do it."

A bizarre part of her laments that she would be the reason he'd have a scar on his side for the rest of his life.

"Izzie." Her name, just her name, full of questions. His voice reminds her of broken glass and it makes her heart hurt, over and over and over. "You can leave me here and find the way--"

"I'm not godsdamned leaving you, you stupid idiot! I'd rather die!" All of her emotions feel so close to the top.

She doesn't notice his hand make its way to her face, her skin wet and sticky with tears and blood. "Then...it will be alright. Won't it?"

How can he be the healer in this situation, even now? She was supposed to catch him. She promised. She nods into his hand. His fingers are slick with sweat and blood and dirt, leaving streaks on her temple. She knows what he's telling her. This is her choice. She has to make it, and be strong, and move. Always, that is her burden. She wills her hands to stop shaking.

"Tell me what to do," she says.

And so she burns him shut.

It's impossibly risky but they do it in one move. Using a similar aetheric process to how she manages her shots, Izzie heats the shrapnel as she pulls it out.

She is sure she will hear his pained scream in her nightmares. At the very end, he passes out. Her heart stops beating, even as she by rote tears fabric from her fine new skirts and begins wrapping it around his middle, shirt pushed up so she can see.

She ties it off. He still doesn't move. Don't think about it.

She straddles his body, keeping her weight upon her own knees, and she leans over his face, her hands curled into his collar.

"Alphinaud. Please wake up."

A moment passes. Two.

His eyes flutter open, even as his mouth bends into a grimace. Her hands fly to his face again. She leaves more bloodstains.

"Oh, my gods, oh, seven holy hells, Alphinaud, I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry, I--"

"It's alright," he says, impossibly. "I'm here."

And in a flutter of emotions and fears and relief, she leans down and kisses him right on the mouth.

He tastes like blood and sweat, and she pulls away before it can become anything more. But the light in his eyes changes -- brightens from their daze. He searches her face, over and over and over.

Why...did she do that?

"Can you move?" she whispers in the dark.

"I won't be fast," he says. She senses some joke, hiding in the depths of his painful grimace. "Long legs or no."

"That's why I'm here." She tries a bawdy grin, but all she can taste is his blood.

---

They rise together, shaking legs and groans of pain.

Alphinaud's arm around her shoulder tightens so hard she has to bite her cheek to distract from new pain. Her arms circle his chest, doing everything in her power to try and keep some weight off his major injury.

Her aetherotransformer hangs off her hip, casting them in a pool of light.

"Is the silence..."

"Not yet," he says through gritted teeth. "It may not. Until we find the others."

Her head is at his collarbone. She leans into his body, and for a fleeting, stupid moment, she thinks about burying her face in his shoulder and sobbing until she can't breathe anymore. Thinks about absorbing the essence of him like it might also take away his pain.

"I'm sorry," she mutters again. In answer, his hand tightens around her shoulder.

"I will never regret it," he says, unusually short-winded.

Sure. But she might regret the need of it, she thinks to snap. What is she in his life, but a source of pain?

And then, impossibly, the darkness on their skin loosens like sifted dirt. Like rain is falling, and they are cleansed...

She takes in a breath. She hadn't realized how short it had been, until she could finally expand her lungs in full. No corruption left to be found.

"They did it," she whispers. "It's over."

His body sags slightly in relief. Her body screams at her, but she would take all of his weight, should he need it. It was the least she could do. It was the least that she owed.

And so they scan about the room, looking for any possible exit.

They search for long enough that they have to sit in exhaustion, still curled into one another's side, certain that without the other they'd collapse.

They sit facing the one lead they could find in the bizarre, too-smooth room. The closest thing to a closed door: the signs of a failing seal in the wall.

Gods above.

Noel will find me, Izzie wills. I know she will.

They sit in silence for long enough it becomes maddening.

And then Alphinaud decides to break the silence by asking: "Did you mean to...did you...mean to--"

"Kiss you?"

Might as well put it out there. His returning silence is answer enough.

Except its not. He never could leave well enough alone. "Because I simply wish to, ah, follow your lead and I would be fine to...I mean to say that I..."

Some part of her finds it hilarious that this is how they are having this discussion. But it's better than sitting scared and exhausted in the dark -- if only barely.

"You'd forget it if I asked," she says.

"If you asked." His voice is quiet. Unreadable. Diplomatic. "Things...happen in the heat of emotion and battle and I wouldn't hold it against you."

Does she want that? Would it be better for him if he did? Her fingers drift to her lips, even so. How does she feel about it? Why did she do it?

"You're..." Ridiculous, she wants to say. Insane. "I don't kiss people just on a stupid whim." Except she literally just did. So that's a lie. Or. Is it?

Her own reaction, however, is smothered by the way his body almost jolts just a smidgen straighter. His eyes meet hers, shadowed by his matted hair, and the wide openness of her face makes some deep part of her keen.

"Really?" he asks.

She nearly laughs for the foolishness of it. "What is that supposed to mean?"

She's not prepared for him to lean down and kiss her back.

Soft. Blood, still, always there, and her own tears, yes -- but a gentleness that makes her tear up. Fleeting as the connection is. Just their mouths touching, really, is all it is. He knows even less about kissing than she does.

But when he pulls away, she finds herself stunned, anyway. "Why did you--"

"You tend to appreciate evenness in these things."

"...Alphinaud." She turns away and stares at the sliver of light in the wall. She hates how well he knows her. Hates the comfort of it in a moment like this, where she doesn't think she deserves it. She is torn between laughing at him and crying. "I'm...you don't have to...do that."

"I need to tell you something important." No. No. Not in the dark in Azys Lla, no, that is not how this is supposed to go. She stiffens under his arm and in response, he loosens his grip on her. But she returns it ten-fold. No, she thinks. You don't get to leave me like this, either. So he barrels onward. A shield wall running forth. "I understand the pressure this statement will put on you," he says, at least now the shadow of his orator self. "But I would never hold it against you, no matter what, and I will never...I could never..." "Just fucking say it." "It will only ever be you, Izzie. Only you. I am not sure there could ever be anyone else." She closes her eyes, heart in her throat, buoyed by fear and...and... "You don't know that for sure," she says into the dark. "...what?"

Shadows pass behind the door, or is it her imagination?

Is it...could she... An idea forms. A wild, insane, crazy idea. Anything to get out of this discussion, right now.

"Look," she says. "I'd rather die than live in a world where you aren't somehow mine. I mean, with me," she says.

She ignores the way his breath catches in his throat, the way his whole body tenses beneath her, not from pain but from...whatever this is. Ignores it, and presses on.

"So that means I have to get you out of here safely. So we can talk about your future properly."

"...but not also yours?"

"I don't think that far ahead," she lies, brazen. "I have a stupid idea. But I think it will get us out of here."

[witchfall]

a long way out to reach the sea [1]

History does not happen in the pretty lines that writers eventually wrangle into finer narratives; one very rarely can stand in a moment and know exactly how it will be remembered.

So he writes it for her in his head, so that someone gets it right.

[or: how a prodigy from Sharlayan and a nobody girl abandoned in the desert find common ground — and something more.]

1. under their eyes

He gasps out a breath. Maybe a warning to Izzie. Assurance to Noel and Tataru, who scream for the Heavens’ Ward to stop. He wants to think it’s that. He knows, ultimately, it is merely a shaking breath of fear that says nothing at all.

read the chapter on ao3

———

Darkness is heavy as a weight in the concessory, the room lit only by pallid yellow globs of light from small oil lanterns. Cold faces sculpted in harsh shadow sneer down at him and Tataru from on high, assuredly as the Church intended, to frighten any lowborn into sniveling and cow any highborn into begging.

Well, Alphinaud is certainly going to do neither.

He breathes in the sticky, still-cold air of this room full of doomsayers and speaks how he was taught. With full enunciation, supported by the diaphragm, loud.

“I, Alphinaud Leveilleur, am innocent of this charge and claim my right to a trial by combat.”

He keeps his fists low to his hips. Izzie mentioned that once. Not that he will be fighting with his fists, not unless this goes terribly sideways in a way he can’t consider. It helps keep the shaking at bay.

He has no choice but to have faith. Of all the ridiculous ironies.

The lalafell girl next to him speaks up in a tremulous voice, but exactly as Haurchefaunt told her to. “I, Tataru Taru, am innocent of this charge...but I am no fighter…so I claim the right to a champion to fight in my stead!”

That’s when the doors slam open.

A furious stripe of red hair half-tumbles into the room, skewing all light in her direction. Like the moon for which the world has named her, Izzie reflects the weak light back upon the faces in the dark, casting everything in a softer glow — even as her mouth twists into a snarl so fearsome it makes Alphinaud’s heart sink down into his gut.

Noel runs in not long after, emerald eyes haunted. Her aether billows out in a fog of possessive fury. 

Even Noel seems unwilling to get in the way of whatever has possessed Izzie with such fervor. So for once, the sun hangs back. 

The adjudicator attempts to regain control of the warbling voices in the chamber. “Who will—”

“I will!” Izzie declares. The way her mouth curls, Alphinaud can almost taste the cuss she wants to hurl at this man. “Or did my entrance not do it for you?”

She’s a sniper. Would they even allow a bow to be used here? The quarters are far too close.

“Very well,” the adjudicator says, eyebrow twitching.

Alphinaud opens his mouth to protest. And then Izzie pulls knives out of her boots.

Something in him twists sharply to the left. The light glints off the silver of her steel; firelight sings across her teeth. She senses underestimation like a scent on the wind and it makes her reckless and wild.

“And just as I was beginning to doubt in the efficacy of the Ishgardian justice system,” he mutters as she approaches, unable to keep his mouth shut as her copper brightness bears down upon him.

“Are you stupid?” she hisses. He jumps when her arm brushes his shoulder as she slides to his side. She’s taller than him, but not by enough to loom. They are both small in their own ways. “What are you going to fight with, your fucking book?”

“I have very little choice in the matter should I want to prove my innocence, thank you.”

Despite the exchange, familiar as parchment, his eyes track the knights of the Heavens’ Ward. He wants to block their levin-lit gazes. They watch Izzie with nigh lascivious scorn.

They want to tear her apart and see what can be done with the pieces. Alphinaud is just collateral, as he so often is anymore.

His hand clenches. When is survival enough? When can the world stop mocking them for it?

“Just stay behind me,” Izzie says, the hissing suddenly gone from her voice.

He only then realizes her words are streaked through with cracks of panic. She breathes heavily, like she’d run the whole way through the city to get here. He opens his mouth to retort, but nothing comes out.

Because then the inquisitors summon the battlefield up from the bowels of this ancient temple. Injustice snarls through Alphinaud at the too-freshly clean lacquer of its marble floor, at the frighteningly sharp metal bars that line its edges, at how this city could engineer so much and how it dedicates its all to something as barbaric as this.

What would Grandfather think?

His thoughts whirl with such tunneled intensity that the adjudicator’s voice becomes little more than a hallowed droning in the back of his head as he and Izzie descend to the battlefield. The inquisitor lifts his hand in some holy invocation that has Izzie’s shoulders tensing.

“Let’s end this farce,” Alphinaud whispers, unhooking his tome from his belt with more bravado than he deserved.

Izzie’s gaze slides toward him with such intensity it burns his peripheral vision. He glances back.

“No heroics, Leveilleur.” A warning, low and rumbling. “I mean it.”

He has no time to reply — no time to dissect the prickling heat that sweeps through his gut from hearing his name out of her mouth — before she leaps, knives aloft, toward knights in shining armor.

...

History does not happen in the pretty lines that writers eventually wrangle into finer narratives; one very rarely can stand in a moment and know exactly how it will be remembered.

So he writes it for her in his head, so that someone gets it right.

When she leaps, the whole world stops to look. She becomes a cream and copper ribbon of motion, thrown forward by two points of steel. The Heavens’ Ward stand slack jawed in the span of time they could have reacted, suffering all at once the crashing of their hubris.

No one in Ishgard believed a wit about the stories of the Warriors of Light, heralding from greater Eorzea.

Two Viera women had saved the land entire, to hear it told — one as beautiful and glorious as the sun, dancing like the chiaroscuro of shadows beneath magnificent boughs as she cast spells made of miracles. The other is as winking and joyous as the full moon, coquettishly hiding behind gales of bright laughter and a voice that would woo Menphina herself.

How could anyone believe it, looking upon them now?

The Dancing Sun, Noel Kisne, stands watching like a boat’s mast shorn in half, broken and splintered, body motionless. She is an eclipse, cursing them all.

And the Laughing Moon, Izzie Nenelori, is no guileless maiden made of frivolity. Her teeth gnash like a cornered animal, the ferocity of her attack unearthing some deeper darkness for the Ishgardians to examine in horror.

Her strength is preternatural and strange. Her battlecries are more akin to a harpie’s screaming than mellifluous sparrow calls. It is all Alphinaud can do to summon Moonstone to cast a shield over her skin as the knights’ weapons come perilously close to slicing her open.

They don’t.

Her foot whirls around to smash into Ser Grinnaux’s jaw, sending him stumbling to the floor. In the same motion, her knife sings across Ser Paulecrain’s cheek, sending a spit of blood flying. Any advantage they may have had with reach weapons evaporates beneath her fearless charge. Death doesn’t threaten her. The notion of it seems to excite her — like she relishes laughing in death’s face.

She dives beneath the pole of Paulecrain’s halberd and skitters aside when Grinnaux’s axe slams into the marble. She grins, all teeth.

Sweat gathers on Alphinaud’s forehead, watching her. For so long, Izzie and Noel had capitulated to his many demands on their time; he’d never stood close enough to actually watch their battles unfold. Such was not his duty.

Something bizarre unfurls inside his chest where his heart should be, the very organ blooming like an orchid as Izzie pummels the hilt of her knife straight into Paulecrain’s nose. Something itchy and petrifying and warm crawls through Alphinaud’s skin, like he is a monster cracking out of an egg, roaring to consume.

Her hair follows her in a silky curtain of fire even now, crowned by two tall, velvety ears. Her freckles stand out from her pale skin like tiny, dark stars. She shouts in fury, lips red and wide open, skin mottled with orange flushing.

She’s beautiful. She could kill him. The two thoughts are one thought, entwined like vines, and his mouth falls open, helpless.

“Alphinaud, pay attention!” Noel snaps from the stands.

He jumps, hearing her voice — cracked through with disuse.

But he is! He is paying attention, thank you very much! Izzie is doing a fine job entertaining their enmity — but then…

The battle shifts.

They seem to notice Alphinaud is…standing there. Book open, carbuncle hissing furiously. Grinnaux turns on a dime, sollerets screeching, to charge him with his axe held aloft. Alphinaud grits his jaw and squares his feet, hand extended as he performs the arcane geometries to ruin him—

Izzie’s leg swings out in the same moment, tripping the knight to the floor. He clatters to the ground in a kerrang of armor, and in the next moment, she leaps on him, knife’s point going for one of the weaknesses in the far too ceremonial plate.

“Don’t run!” she snarls. “That’s no fun!”

Ser Grinnaux screams in pain.

But Izzie is distracted, giving Paulecrain — face caked with dark blood from his nose — ample time to rise up, halberd intent upon her neck.

No, some part of Alphinaud whispers. You don’t get to do this to her. Not for me. Not again.

Alphinaud half-shouts as a crackling, deep-dark Ruin spell flies toward Paulcrain’s chest from his grimoire. The knight stumbles backward, breathless, only to be further accosted by Moonstone’s chittering fury, leaping to his chest, scratching at his jaw.

Izzie’s fist flies across Grinnaux’s face. His head smacks the stone ground with a sickening thunk, but it only seems to make him angrier.

To be bested so easily by a 19-year-old girl?

Inhuman strength possesses him and he throws her from his body. Her back hits the far wall in a thick crunch. Noel screams. Haurchefaunt calls out the inhumanity of it. Alphinaud’s stomach falls to his feet.

Grinnaux pulls out her knife from his chest with a far too thick squelching sound, blood dripping from the steel before he tosses it to the ground. Then his haunting, bright eyes fixate on Alphinaud.

“Halone smite you!” he bellows.

What happens next is a blur.

Aetheric chains suddenly squeeze Alphinaud about the ribs, crushing him so fully that he forgets how to breathe. His grimoire falls to the ground in his shock; he’s never been accosted like this, never been attacked with the full intent to kill before, not in a way that actually landed, not in a way that will leave bruises if he even survives.

He gasps out a breath. Maybe a warning to Izzie. Assurance to Noel and Tataru, who scream for the Heavens’ Ward to stop. He wants to think it’s that. He knows, ultimately, it is merely a shaking breath of fear that says nothing at all.

Grinnaux stalks toward him, mouth curving in a bloody crescent.

And then a horrifying, guttural scream shakes the very foundations of the church.

In the next moment, a flash of copper is in front of Alphinaud, and the chains break as easily as if Izzie had cut her steel through a fraying rope. Alphinaud collapses to the floor, head spinning, body aching so furiously his eyes prick with tears. Izzie throws that same knife right at Grinnaux’s face—

—only for it to cut a sharp line across the side of his neck. He shouts, gauntleted hands going automatically to the blood flowing from the crack in his skin. Paulecrain bellows in fury, charging her, and Alphinaud cries out, voice choked, scrambling for his tome somewhere upon the floor, because she is utterly weaponless—

But with inhuman strength, she grabs the long shaft of the halberd and uses his own momentum to swing him aside into the same wall that Grinnaux had just thrown her into, like he is a bug at the end of a swatter.

Perhaps Halone is here after all. Perhaps the Heavens’ Ward knows that.

Izzie stalks forward, grabbing her bloodied knife off the ground. She marches soullessly toward Paulecrain, who throws his hands up.

Pleading.

“No!” Paulecrain cries, scrambling back. “We yield! We yield!”

“And so it is decided!” The high adjudicator declares, voice hurried and breathless to stop Izzie before she kills both of the knights. “The accused are deemed innocent beneath the eyes of the Fury! May She keep you in Her hallowed halls!”

The rest of the adjudicator’s cronies wave and shout for healers while Izzie stands there, breathing hard, eyes blown open, hands and knuckles dripping with blood.

“We won!” Tataru shouts, disbelieving.

Alphinaud slowly rises on his shaking legs, wiping tears from his eyes before Izzie can see. It doesn’t feel like a win, watching Izzie return to herself through the mist of his pain. It doesn’t feel like anything good at all.

He is drawn to her side like the very chain she’d broken in her fury. He reaches out a trembling hand to touch her shoulder. Decides not to at the last second.

Her head twists around to stare at him, half-lifeless, half-scalding. His hand lingers in the air between them like a hummingbird.

Her gaze rakes through his face, his body, and then her whole body turns toward him and her palms press into his shoulders.

He is breathless. He has no words, which never happens to him. The spots where her palms touch him tingle as if she held levin crystals to his body.

“Are you okay?” Her words are choked through with sensation. Scratchy from screaming, shaking from adrenaline, sharp with unbalanced determination he can’t quite pin down.

“Yes,” he says, somehow. “Yes.” He remembers himself, bit by bit. “My thanks. Are you?”

She blinks, as if shocked by the question, and then nods slowly. “Yeah. I think so.”

They stare at each other.

For so long, most of their interactions have been defined by acidity. The moment they’d met, she’d called him a prissy nonce who should go home to his mother. And maybe she had been right, he thinks, miserable. Maybe he should have listened to her. Look at this mess they’re in, all because of him.

The Scions are gone because of him.

But he had gotten comfortable in their spiky back and forth. She kept coming back even after she told him off any number of times. She'd even return without Noel sometimes for her next assignment, as if perhaps she could tolerate him if it meant helping other people. He’d decided, long ago, she simply believed in the cause.

Now, he wonders if she had gotten comfortable, too.

This seems too much to hope for, that she cared about him beyond being the boy who pretended to be her commander. This seems like something a different, less cocksure fool would deserve.

“Be more careful, you idiot,” she snaps, furious. “Noel would never forgive herself if anything happened to you. Do you want to make her even more sad?”

He opens his mouth to retort — because he can read between the lines far better than she can and he knows, he knows in a flash of intuition that burns, that she isn’t talking about Noel.

Why doesn’t she just say that? What about it makes it so she can’t? He saw everything. He saw the ferocity of her defense. It was personal.

Is it always like that for her? Does it scare her?

But then they are swept aside in the current of their friends and allies pulling them out from the tribunal to the stained-glass shadows in the vestibule and he decides, wisely, to drop it.

Thinking about it makes his hands shake — and he can’t afford any more weakness.

[witchfall]

messages from broken bottles

"Messages from broken bottles fall on black sandy beaches. Ink in vein across the page now run from morning dew. Hands which chance upon it lead to eyes that strain to read; Hearts which pound from love long overdue; Lips which press together stifle rhythmic heavy breaths.

Oh how she smiles from vicarious love from the one he writes about. She must have been so glad for him to throw it out."

-black sandy beaches, the dear hunter

Perhaps daughters are born fools.

//Lyna&Exarch, WoL/Exarch, named miqo'te WoL

//3558 words, rated G.

//5.3 spoilers. References to familial loss. ao3 link in the reblogs

~~~

When her recruits ask her about the Warrior of Darkness, days after night finally comes to Lakeland, Lyna lies.

Did you know it was her, when you first met? What did you think of her? Did you know she would change everything?

She tilts her head, ear twitching beneath the sun. She smirks. She asks them to run a mile wearing full regalia. And then, when they're little more than clanking chain on the breeze, she turns her face to the wind and closes her eyes.

The lie is in the obfuscation. The lie is to herself.

---

Of course, Lyna had long thought of what she would say.

She could lie and agree that it happened upon first sight of the mystel who would take on the mantle of Warrior of Darkness. It would be a side-stepping sort of lie. She had no thoughts regarding the red-haired woman who had approached their gates, leering with nameless intent, except that she was too confident for one who was traveling alone.

Such baseless confidence was a threat. Lyna blocked her way.

She only realized something had shifted when she saw her grandfather -- the Exarch -- running toward them. When had she last seen him run? She had forgotten that his body could move like that, even with the youthful visage he wore. He stopped suddenly, a gash of crimson in Lakeland's cool horizon, and though his voice rang out with steady warmth, there was something wholly too practiced about it. He dismissed Lyna near immediately.

No. Do not lie. She dismissed herself.

She had no choice, seeing what she saw. The breathless way his hands curled into and out of fists. The way his body leaned in toward the newcomer in strange collusion. The way his gravity shifted. By the time Lyna managed the words to remove herself from the interaction, she suddenly understood what it felt like to be dismissed from the Stairs at closing hour. Go home. Try, in your drunken stupor, to remember where that is.

She walked brusquely to her post and stood so straight her guards fell silent.

Some other evening, many days after that meeting, Lyna visits him. The furious clawing in her stomach would not rest, no matter her application of calming tea or woody brandy. She feels like a child, knocking tremulously upon his door, and perhaps something in her face spooks him; he throws the door open wide and gestured her inside despite her stony silence.

"Something is different," she admits eventually. She pointedly sets upon his table a loaf of the cinnamon-raisin bread he so liked to buy (and that she, as a child, so liked to steal tastes of before he’d share it with her openly). "I do not know what."

"In truth?" His pause is heavy. "Our salvation may come at last."

She shoves aside propriety. "Then why do you sound so dour?"

Gods, she hates when he smiles like this.

His mouth turns in such a way that she sees his timelessness like dust motes in a shard of light. He existed long before her and he may, gods willing, exist long after her, and this smile emphasizes his strangeness so wholly that she must squint at him as if looking through a foggy window.

Worst of all, this is the smile he once wore when she'd spy on him reading one particular letter in his study, all alone.

Like he's somewhere else, far away from her. Like perhaps he'd rather be there.

"Change is an oft painful thing, my dear," he says. "No matter the good that comes of it."

"I don't think it must always be thus," she says, petulant. Like a teenager again. Frustratingly, he just smiles and tears off a piece of the bread to hand to her. Ever patient with his charge.

The guard captain takes the bread as well as her leave, preferring the frustration to the fear she feels, hearing him speak this way. Something is different. Her question is answered well enough.

She stuffs her mouth with the sweet bread and tries to forget.

---

The first hint to the truth is when Lyna sees the Warrior in battle.

The Warrior’s voice rises clear and high above their heads as she fires arrows into their enemies. Lyna has the frightening sense that she could hear the voice if she were malms and malms away, like it’s bigger than the very air it rides. The Exarch holds the van for them at first, but later when Lyna and the Warrior fight side by side, the guard captain is shocked at the ferocity with which the young woman approaches her enemies. She is a flash of blood red and cherrywood, teeth bared, as she slashes her knife across the neck of a soldier who came too close.

Lyna is reminded of peculiar epithets from her grandfather’s stories: the Bow against the Dark. The Red across the Sky. The Song upon the Wind.

She thought it a coincidence at best. At worst, her grandfather’s power wove together a woman that fit the stories he’d tell because he couldn’t find anyone suitable here in the city he made.

The Warrior wrinkles her nose when Lyna and the Exarch both refer to her as such. “Please. It’s just Izzie. Not...whatever that is.”

Frankly, Lyna is miffed that such an...informal woman is apparently the answer they’ve all been waiting for. She also, unfortunately, likes that about Izzie very much.

But perhaps daughters are born fools. The answer regarding the Warrior is the simplest version of all events, as answers tend to be.

Lyna simply did not think it possible.

---

War befalls them. The guard captain is busy. She prefers this, despite circumstances.

Then the worst happens. The contingency plan she never thought she’d enact snaps into action; whole lists of instruction painstakingly left by her grandfather, her Exarch, run in her head like a broken orchestrion, over and over like a prayer for his return.

The key to the Umbilicus makes her palm sweat even under heavy gloves. She takes a patrol to clear her mind while the Warrior languishes in her room. The plan won’t matter if the Warrior, the woman named Izzie, never wakes up, so she has this bit of time to herself. To mull.

The children tell old stories, even now under the garish return of light. She overhears them in the Musica Universalis surrounded by the scent of baking bread and she stops for a moment to listen in, comforted by the familiar normalcy -- how she as a child had heard and told many of the same stories still in heavy circulation today, right here surrounded by the hubbub of adults. Perhaps this is why change makes her so uncomfortable; so much about the Crystarium has prolonged in sameness until now.

...and then she, the Bow against the Dark, looked upon the Crystalline Tower and grinned back at the adventurers. For they had done the impossible, and cleared it of every monster left by the empire of eld...

She is throttled back through memories. A million points connect in her head like distant stars.

...the way he had ran. Like he’d been waiting...for...

She speed walks, half mad, to her grandfather’s study. She hears nothing but the beat of her heart pulsing through her long ears; only years of training keeps her face neutral as her lungs stretch for breath. She’s supposed to give this key to the Warrior, whoever she is…

But Lyna knows this may be the last chance she’s ever given to find the secret at the edges of her grandfather’s long life.

It comes as no surprise that the entrusted key is a skeleton key of some sort, unlocking every door in the tower and every drawer in his ancient desk. She hunts, papers flying, for the ancient piece of parchment she knew her grandfather kept most hidden, akin to the way he treated his heart. Gods, that should have been hint enough. That should have told her everything.

She finds it buried purposefully deep. Below stacks of tax documents and Mean inventory records, as if he knew whoever may go seeking it would be repelled by such tedium. She knows it is the letter she seeks because it is on a type of paper she’s never seen made in the Crystarium -- and because she recognizes its shape from too many shadowy memories.

How long had he hidden this paper from her. The youthful thrill of discovery is tempered harshly by too many truths and too many years.

It is no deep revelation of the Exarch’s past. It is no piece of any puzzle finally found hidden in the dust. It’s not even a sickly love letter. The parchment is thin from overhandling. The ink is smudged. It’s a hastily scribbled out note with many words crossed out in deep blue gashes, as if the writer was embarrassed but in too much of a hurry to linger long.

[a heavy scribble out of a word and then] G’raha,

They’re sending me out to deal with Ramuh finally, though I don’t know what good I’m gonna be if he’s one of them primals that talk? Or whatever? I don’t know. I’m not a scholar. You know.

A nice primal...apparently. ???

Anyway I had to go fast but I wanted to leave you this note just so you didn’t think I was running out on our duties or anything. You don’t get to hold that against me. Okay!

In the meantime why don’t you practice playing Triple Triad with Rammbroes? Maybe get good enough that I don’t feel pity every time I beat your ass? Hehe. I will get you to the Gold Saucer at some point to start your own deck. It’s fun! You need more fun in your life.

But don’t have too much fun without me.

See you later.

L[and then a long scribble here that somehow missed the L, since L on its own doesn’t make sense as a valediction],

Izzie

Izzie.

Izzie.

Lyna stumbles out into the Ocular, which spins strangely in her vision. The weight of the realization wets her eyes and turns her feet to lead. Lyna had never heard the Exarch speak his true name, but the convention was like nothing of their lands, just like...just like this Izzie…

This woman who fits his every story about a hero from his long-lost homeland.

The woman who brought a spring to his step no one had seen in a century.

The Warrior. Sprung not from dream, but from his heart.

---

Lyna finishes her patrol. She takes on another shift and goes to the highest spot upon the lowly Lakeland fortress lining the Crystarium outskirts and stands at attention under the glaring Light.

No matter how hard she clenches her fists behind her back, she cannot shake the unrepentant shadow hounding her every thought. She walks as an imposter in her own memories.

What didn't she know? What shades have been cast, knowing the depth of that which he has hidden? What had he been thinking all those years, when she asked for story after story about the hero of his homeland?

She should have known from the moment she saw the Warrior of Darkness that it would mean the end of the world as she knew it. She should have known that the moment the sky turned black with night. But the truth of it is this: She refused to understand it until her heart could bear it, and by then it was too late.

Because it was not the Warrior of Darkness she met that day in Lakeland. It was a woman named Izzie, who had hair the color of fire and who signed her name like a scrawl in the dirt.

A woman who called her grandfather...G’raha.

A name Lyna found hidden in the dark of his desk, buried so deep he planned to die before he’d tell her himself.

---

Lyna is unsure how much time passes before the Warrior herself appears before her. Lyna startles to attention, worried for a split moment she’d summoned Izzie from her ponderings.

“You’re awake,” Lyna sputters. She is relieved, despite everything, for it isn’t Izzie’s fault that the Exarch held many secrets in his life from his charge.

Izzie crosses her arms over her chest protectively. She looks askance so her loose bang curtains her eyes. “For whatever good it’ll do anyone.”

Lyna is struck by a wild thought: The Warrior of Darkness looks...young. She reminds Lyna of a teenager thrust into battle who grew around the ruin of wartime, like so many of the youths she grew alongside. And yet her eyes belie a hardness to her, honed over years of all the stories her grandfather used to tell.

All the stories that must have been true.

“Lyna,” Izzie says suddenly. “I’m. I’m really sorry...I...should have stopped him somehow.”

The pity rankles her, even if it is exactly what she wanted Izzie to say.

“I don’t think you could have,” Lyna says.

Izzie’s mouth thins but she doesn’t say anything.

“Walk with me,” Lyna implores.

Izzie follows her off the parapet in silence, her mystel ears pinned to head as if Lyna is walking her to her execution. There’s something very funny about this situation. If only she had the energy to laugh.

They walk down the barren path into the Crystarium. The city is hunkering down for disaster and so they had the privacy of the open road. “You knew him,” Lyna says. She slows to a stop so that Izzie eventually stands parallel to her. “Before.”

Izzie doesn’t jump, per say, but her ears and tail flick upward so fast she might as well have. “How did you...know that?”

“I didn’t know for sure,” Lyna says, “until I found this.”

She hands Izzie the crumpled, thin piece of parchment and the woman gapes at it before she seizes it in her strong hands, eyes running over it until--

She cringes so hard Lyna almost laughs on the spot.

“He saved this?” she mutters, her eyebrows knitting together. Her mouth turns downward. “Oh gods.” A choked laugh. “I just wrote, ‘L, Izzie’, like that made sense.” Her hand goes to her forehead, eyes running over the words again and again. Her voice turns low and dark. “Why was I so stupid?”

The reaction is...confusing.

“He read it constantly.” Lyna straightens herself. “Over and over.” Izzie should know it. She may not have the answers her grandfather would never give, Lyna realizes heavily, but if Lyna doesn’t hold the most important spot in his heart, the woman who does should at least be aware.

“Every story we were ever told,” Lyna says, “was about you. You were the Song Upon the Wind. The Bow against the Dark. It was always you. Everything.”

Izzie’s face turns to a horrified mask.

Lyna presses on regardless, even as she feels like she is skittering against gravel. “But he never...he never said anything about his life when…”

Izzie grabs her by the upper arms, stilting the rest of her words.

Tears shimmer in Izzie’s eyes. “Lyna. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was him.”

How, Lyna thinks to ask, could you not have known? The way he hovers around you?

But she knows exactly how.

Lyna closes her eyes. Perhaps there is no helping this. Everything, including the sky, is unraveling -- and so must Izzie and Lyna become unraveled, too. The key is heavy in her pocket as she remembers it and remembers what she must do.

She knows her grandfather well enough to know that whatever Izzie may find in the Umbilicus was not meant to be found while the man was still alive. She thinks about how he allowed no others to live in the Tower with him except herself because one day, he said, it would no longer be there.

Perhaps Izzie is the harbinger of this. Lyna wishes that fate on no woman -- especially not this one, looking at her with such deep wariness.

Especially not this one, who clearly loved her grandfather enough to be moved to tears by the thought of his love in turn.

“He left something for you,” Lyna says.

Izzie finally looks away, like she can’t bear it.

Someone has to, Lyna thinks. He must have somehow known that, too. Even Lyna is a gift for Izzie, in the end. But Lyna is thankful that he trusted her with this -- what could be the salvation of the world, if his faith holds true.

---

The world is indeed saved. All of their work -- his work -- comes to fruition. Hope alights in her breast so bright she can scarcely breathe for the promise of it.

But her grandfather does eventually disappear, like he swore he would one day. At least, the part of him that mattered to Lyna.

This is the way of all parents and their children, says a small voice in her head. But not them. Not her Exarch. Not her grandfather. He was supposed to be eternal, and she was supposed to be a special memory to him, one that mattered. But now she’s not sure how much is true, and they were separated before either could figure out how to talk about it.

And of all the people who understand the most, it is the woman his grandfather chose to spend the rest of his strange life with.

Izzie grasps the soul crystal between her palms with a gentleness Lyna has never seen from her; in fact, Lyna realizes she's barely ever seen Izzie outside of battle. She carries herself like her bones fit in her body, for once. The blistering air about her feels pleasantly cooled, like Ahm Arang before twilight. Lyna’s glad that perhaps she will get to see more of this Izzie. It isn’t all loss this day.

“I didn’t ask him to do this, Lyna.” Izzie’s voice is small but intent. “You know that, right? He didn’t...he didn’t tell me until…”

Her words trail off. Familiar repetition, felt across the lives of two women.

A strange peace comes over Lyna, then. Like a goodnight kiss, steeling one against separation. “Grandfather loves his secrets, does he not?”

Izzie smirks, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You think he’d learned his lesson the first time.”

“The most stubborn of men, I’m afraid.”

Izzie, the Warrior of Darkness and Light both...giggles.

Lyna understands suddenly the woman his grandfather might have fallen for upon a time. But her face falls before Lyna can store it long in her memory.

“When my Da died,” Izzie begins, her voice measured, “his friends came to the funeral, of course. That was good and all that. They talked with my Ma all about stories of my Da before...before I knew him. You know.” She scratches her ear. “Um. You know how lalafell...er, dwarves here, I guess...you know how gossipy they can be, right?”

Lyna blinks. “Your father was a dwarf?”

“I was adopted,” Izzie says briskly.

Lyna suddenly understands...much. She puts a hand on the smaller woman’s shoulder.

“Anyway,” Izzie continues, as if startled, “I...I was full-grown when he passed but it was the first time I’d ever thought of him as someone who could have been as stupid as me.” A flash of a smile, but she sobers quickly. “Once upon a time, he was someone who didn’t know me. Even though he’s the only Da I’ve ever known. And that really got to me for a while, that once upon a time he was a person he didn’t tell me much about.”

Lyna looks away, eyes misting.

“You know what I’m saying, right?” Izzie tilts her head to try and meet Lyna’s gaze. “You know a different G’raha than I do. And I’m really glad he had you, Lyna. Really glad. I think you kept him sane.”

“You do not have to say that,” Lyna says automatically.

Izzie’s brows furrow. “I’m saying it because it’s true. And you know it.”

Lyna takes a steadying breath, but it doesn’t stop her voice from breaking. “Sometimes I do not.”

Izzie extends a hand to grasp Lyna’s shoulder. They both ground each other in a maelstrom of loss and hopes newly made, right before their paths must split for a time.

“Me either.” Izzie sniffs. “Lyna, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I was a huge pain in the ass as a child.”

And Lyna laughs.

“And you know what, so was your grandfather, back in my day. Did he ever tell you how we met?”

They sit for a time up in one of the highest spots in the Crystarium, looking over the fluttering lavender of Lakeland while the wind blows their hair from their faces. They share their stories like breaking bread -- a strange, warm sort of memorial for the strangest, warmest man Lyna would ever know.

His soul flickers like a heart between them. And Lyna swears she feels his contentment on the air, if she quiets for long enough. It reminds her, strangely, of cinnamon bread.

Even if it is a fancy, she thinks, it is one I do not mind so much.