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yetanotherfanficblog · 2 years ago

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A New Dawn

Pact Commander Siggi Vilodsdottir woke up at her usual early morning time, but the light peeking through the flap of her tent was - different. Wait, of course. Sun's Refuge. The exhaustion of actually getting the damn place up, or just leftover grogginess from her first night of decent sleep in ages, had momentarily made her forget, to expect the sun outside her tent flap.

No, these were caves, and it would be cave living for a while. As they formulated a way to take care of Kralkatorrik, they had made the subterranian lair their home - The massive Elder Dragon could never dig this deep, and even his smaller minions would find themselves hard pressed to pass through the narrow redoubts and defeat the magical defenses left by Sunspears past - now reactivated in service of Sunspears present - so here they remained, for the moment. The light from the giant braziers, reflected off the crystals, natural and brand alike, embedded in the walls, certainly made for adequate light, but it wasn't quite the same as the wide, wild sun.

Still, If anyone knew how to live without the sun, it was the Norn.

Pulling on a Jerkin, Siggi stood and threw back the flap of her tent, eager to find something to break her fast - perhaps the foragers had found some good venison - when she nearly tripped over it. A wreath.

A wild grin broke across her face. That dork. He was really going to do this proper, wasnt he? She reached down, ready to pluck it off the ground, but about halfway there, she hesitated as something caught her attention, a quick movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked up. Yes. There, behind that rock column. Trying VERY hard, and failing nearly as hard, to look inconspicious, was Braham Eirrson himself.

She hesitated, not out of second thoughts, but just because the boy could probably stand to sweat a bit. Good for his humility. Wasn't right for a Norn to hold a grudge long as he did.

Then again, she was Norn too, huh? And there was another way to handle this...

Finally, she turned back into her tent - but only for a moment, snatching up her best travelling stein. As she exited again, she saw Braham, who had been hunched over, suddenly straight again, looking desperately, wildly at her.

She plunked the stein down in the center of the wreath, crossed her arms, and raised an eyebrow at him. Braham coughed, nodded, and slunk off.

***

A few hours later, after she'd had a chance to eat and answer about 1000 different questions from various Pact Officers and Sunspears, help out a few Refugees, and discuss possible dragon tracking measures with Taimi and her boys, she finally came to the Vigil tents, where everyone had pooled what alcohol they had for a kind of tavern of sorts, a place to go to take a break, relax, and, if needed get just a bit drunk, to take the edge off. Braham was sitting at the end of one of the longer, less populated benches, and Siggi stopped at the the makeshift bar just long enough to grab their first round - Iron Legion Ale, Charr Beer. Almost as good as Ice Ale from the Wayfarer Foothills, in a pinch. As She walked up to Braham, Steins balanced in hand, he had just finished glaring down a poor Vigil soldier who looked like they were coming to sit across from him. Siggi chuckled, more at Braham's seriousness than the poor Soldier's misfortune, and easily slipped in across from the other Norn.

"Hey Kid. Shake off the Spiders yet?"

"What!? N- I mean Yes- I mean, it's fine why would I care about Spiders? We killed them all! Er, we did kill them all, right?"

Siggi couldn't help herself, breaking into an uproarius laugh at Braham's attempts to keep a slight panic under control, "I'm sorry Braham, I just teasing! If there's any spiders left, I'd imagine they're staying hidden for good, after the drubbing we gave their queen."

Braham nodded, blushing slightly with embarassment, "Oh. Yeah, It's fine. Spiders are gone."

Siggi pushed one of the steins toward Braham, "Iron Legion Ale. Not as good as a good Wayfarer Ice Brew, but beggars can't be choosers."

Braham took the Stein gratefully and took a huge gulp straight away. Siggi smirked again and followed suit.

As they set their mugs down, Braham cleared his throat, "So. How many mugs of these do you think we'll need to put this behind us?"

"Eh," Siggi waved a hand dismissively, "It's all snowmelt, far as I'm concerned. I forgave you a long time ago, just needed you to come around."

Poor Braham made a confused face, "Then Why not take the wreath in?"

"Listen," Siggi continued, with a small smile, "I gave you the Stein in the wreath for a couple reasons. One, I wanted an excuse to drink, and two, it's been way too long since we just sat down and TALKED, you know?"

"Oh. Yeah. I guess it has, huh?"

So they talked, avoiding the subject of their fight for the moment, speaking of Braham's adventures in the High Shiverpeaks, of Siggi's own adventures combating Balthazar - most of it he had heard second hand, but he wanted to hear it from Siggi. Ale after Ale appeared before them, and by the time conversation wound down, Siggi could confidently declare herself pleasantly tipsy, warm and buzzing down to her toes, and judging by Braham swaying on the bench across from her, he was somewhere in the same steading.

"Huh," he chuckled, "Imagine if I hadn't been such a Dolyak's ass. Could have helped you take down a human God. That would have been something to see."

Siggi chuckled, "Maybe. Then again, I did have to die to do it."

Braham frowned, "And maybe if I was there, I could have stopped him from killing you. I AM sorry, Commander..."

"Hey." Siggi set down her stein again for a moment, staring seriously across the table, "Already forgiven, remember? Wreath-sworn. Besides, Losing a parent affects a lot of us pretty badly."

"Hell. Losing my Mom probably affected you, huh?" Braham murmured, staring at the table, "I've been thinking about that, lately. She was your mentor. You two hunted together, built a legend together, she even sponsored you into the Pact."

Siggi nodded, "Yeah. She was... special, to me."

"And you kept on anyway."

"I did. I had a lot of people to save. If I had stopped to mourn her, how many more would have been lost?"

Braham took an especially long swig of ale after that, stared off into the middle distance.

"I... wonder if maybe the real problem was... I was jealous of you. You were closer to her than I was. Eir handpicked you as a champion of the great hunt. She recommended you to the orders, sheparded you until you were a force to defeat an elder dragon on your own. Hell, she was almost more of a Mom to you than she was to me."

Siggi raised an eyebrow, "C'mon, I'm not THAT much younger than her. Eir was more like..."

Siggi paused for a moment. Her mind flitted back, as it often did, to a certain night by a campfire, a night in while the bitter cold of the Shiverpeaks pierced even the hardy hides of the norn, and they found it prudent to share a bedroll for warmth. But then, prudency gave way to an awareness of bare skin touching skin, of a desire that no longer seemed worth hiding. No, Braham wasn't ready for that story. She wasn't sure she'd ever share that with anyone else anyway.

"...Let's just say, cool older sister?"

Braham chuckled, "Huh. yeah, that makes sense. And I guess I'd describe you the same way."

"That's me, cool older sister to thousands of squabbling pact children." Siggi raised her stein one last time and drained the current contents, a far-too-weak human brew. Really had to strengthen the supply lines here if they were already down to the human-brewed stuff, she thought absent-mindedly.

#guild wars 2 #braham eirsson #living world season 4 #norn commander #eir stegalkin #gw2 #fanfic #this feels more like a fragment than a full fanfic #but i just like the idea of braham and a norn commander getting in a proper norn apology and talking about eir

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eparch · 2 years ago

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Lucilaeh finds herself changed, physically and otherwise, by her battles in Elona.

2.3k words. On AO3.

So...I figure I should post my fics here too. I wrote and first posted this back in May, as the first real exploration of my Commander's character to try and get a feel for her. It's very 'follows canon' for the most part and a lot of self-indulgent introspection. It's also my first attempt at gw2 fic, so admittedly canon characters might be a little off?

I mention this in the AO3 notes but this entire fic came about because I wanted a change in look for Luci after finishing Path of Fire, chose the thorn hair, and ended up wanting a lore reason which just led to "well...fire was very involved at the end there, so..."

Fic takes place through the end of PoF and first half of S4 and references personal story.

***

Balthazar flings his fire, battle, war at her, and Lucilaeh faces it, all of it, with nothing but a sword that had once been his. There's no time to breathe. She just has to stay on her feet and fight back. There's no time to think about every flame that licks at her, every impact that catches her.

She's not alone, not like Balthazar claims. Not when Sohothin weighs as heavy as Caladbolg; not when Vlast's memories sit in her pocket; not when Aurene is right there and she, too, is fighting.

They kill a god together, and Kralkatorrik roars.

And it burns. Everything burns.

Lucilaeh stays where she lands for a moment. Triumph soars through her, but she aches all over, aches so keenly. She wonders if the hurt is hers or Aurene's.

For Aurene, she gets back up, staggering to her feet and desperately clawing through magic-thick air for command of her senses. For Aurene, she finds her voice and calls out, but perhaps she's too slow to do so that Aurene flies off. Vaguely, she's aware of Kralkatorrik following, but she's slipping away by then, and the rest of Dragon's Watch (and Canach) find her sprawled out, unconscious.

***

Kasmeer tells her when she wakes that Rytlock carried her all the way back to Amnoon, where she has been given a far too lavish room to recover in. Canach fills in the details of how gentlemanly the Charr had been while masterfully avoiding Rytlock's growling glares. Lucilaeh laughs and thanks him, before briefing them on the new situation.

"I'll be fine," she promises eventually, "in time for tonight's party at the very least."

She does feel fine. Even with Kralkatorrik's threat, she feels a greater weight lifted than when they had silenced Mordremoth's voice.

"So," starts Kasmeer, making small talk as their somber discussion on the dragons settles toward silence, "are you planning to regrow your branches?"

"What?"

The weight she felt lifted from her shoulders turns out a little more literal than she'd thought.

"I-I thought you knew," stammers Kasmeer as Lucilaeh examines the damage in a mirror the human had been quick to fetch. "Canach said you could regrow it, so I wondered..."

"How long has it been like this?" she asks, not taking her eyes off the jagged and blackened burnt ends now crowning her speckled face. She turns her face this way, then that, remembering precisely the long branches and the flowers that had grown with them.

"It started when you died." Canach, blunt as ever, though there is perhaps wavering in his voice. "The flowers were gone when we found you. After all, you were quite...singed. Largely scorched, if I'm being honest. Balthazar must've set fire to the rest today."

"Riveting imagery," she remarks, earning a quirk of his brow.

"Does it hurt? At all?" Kasmeer's gaze is politely inquisitive, and Lucilaeh knows she can't fault her for the curiosity. Many of the finer details of Sylvari physiology are still largely mysteries, after all—both to everyone and to themselves.

"It doesn't hurt," she replies truthfully. Physically, she doesn't add. She's had many injuries over the years, from battle or otherwise, and this doesn't feel anything like those at all. She has plenty of them too this time, thus the bandages snaking around near every part of her, but her heart—it does sting, she must admit. She's never considered herself vain, but she's always been pleased with the appearance she's worn since waking from the Dream.

"So it really is just like cutting your hair," muses Rytlock.

"Or shaving a Charr," adds Canach.

"Has anyone contacted Taimi?" she cuts in quick before Canach can continue or Rytlock can react.

"Phlunt picked up when I tried," answers Kasmeer.

Lucilaeh breathes in deep. "Okay, one thing at a time then."

***

She attends the party without a hat or any sort of head covering, though she hasn't been partial to wearing one in a long time now anyway. Most of the citizens of Amnoon had seen her in Rytlock's arms, had seen the damage to her body. The amount of blackened bark on her seems to add to the growing whispers following her, but that's not quite anything new. People have watched her since the days of her first Wyld Hunt and they've taken plenty of her scars and woven them into stories and raised them into legends.

She doesn't like to dwell on this. The thought has always frustrated her, and it's all the worse now that she knows her victories were world-ending mistakes.

But the party delights her, despite her best efforts to stay somber. She dances among the crowd and samples the various foods around the hall. When she mistakenly bites into a decorative flower, she supposes she can't stall any longer, hurrying away from the table so she can step up to the waiting podium.

She gazes out at the crowd, at their hopeful faces, at her friends who are giving her encouraging gestures as discreetly as they can manage. She breathes in.

"People of Amnoon..."

***

The next war arrives in a vision, then nearly losing Taimi, then a ship consumed by plague, then a direct invitation—it's not till several weeks after her victory over Balthazar that Lucilaeh gets a moment to breathe again, during the smallest of time she can afford once the camp in Kourna is ready. There's a starving village up north to visit, and no small part of her wants to rush to their aid, but she's been wanting to check on a certain group of her allies this whole time.

"Commander," calls out Taimi as she approaches the rooftop where the trio of Asura have set up their equipment. They've been joined by a giant beetle since the last time she's seen them. "Hey, I didn't have a chance to say this when we met up in Amnoon, but—looking good"

"Huh?"

Taimi gestures at her own hair, grinning. Lucilaeh blinks; she hasn't consciously been growing that part of her, so she has zero conception of what she even looks like at the moment.

"Thank you, Taimi," she says instead, filing away 'find a mirror' into her growing list of priorities. She looks around and she wants to ask Taimi some more about how she's doing, but her gaze naturally falls onto the beetle. "Now, Canach said Gorrik had something to show me..."

***

She does get an opportunity many hours later, when she takes a wrong turn on her way back to base from the village and finds herself in front of a secluded lake, to examine her new appearance. The still, clear water within the enclosed canyon does as well as any mirror as it provides water for Glory, her trusty raptor.

She had carefully trimmed away the blackened ends of her hair a while ago, but the branches have not grown back. Instead, thorny vines sprout from her, dangling down mere inches from her shoulders. They remind her of the endlessly crisscrossing jungle far to the west; of tendrils lashing at her feet and overhead; of the voice that had once weighed heavy and pushed upon her mind. She reaches up and twirls one of the loose vines, feeling the thorns prick her blue bark.

"I belong to no dragon," she says aloud, and immediately she thinks of Aurene, whom she's sure would agree. From where it lays in the shade nearby, Glory trills in response. She laughs. "You think so too, hm?"

She doesn't dislike the change, though. It's different, and it reminds her of a dark year, but perhaps it just suits the sort of Sylvari she's become. Her reflection offers her a wry smile. Losing her naive flowers in favor of these guarded vines—what would Tybalt and Demmi have thought of them, of her?

Perhaps it is the calm of the water that makes her so much more wistful than usual, but then...when was the last time she sat down like this to gather her thoughts so quietly?

Tybalt would have liked the change, she decides, and Demmi might be a little more disappointed to see her flowers gone, but still supportive. They never had that apple cider, but Lucilaeh had spent long hours both in and out of Whispers fieldwork just chatting with her late Charr mentor, then with Demmi in the mix once she'd joined the Order. She had learned a lot about their worlds, their cultures—and those chats had contributed greatly to her early dealings with both Charr and humans—and in turn she had answered whatever curiosity they had for Sylvari.

"Who could have ever thought," she tells her reflection and the imaginary Tybalt and Demmi that flank it, "that we came from a dragon?"

Neither can reply, of course. She sits up and breathes in the cool, clear air over the spring, lets it fill her.

"But that dragon is dead," she continues. "Just like Zhaitan and Balthazar. And their magic has spread to the others. And my brothers and sisters are at long last free."

...free to die with the rest of Tyria if she makes another mistake.

"But I didn't know, and even then—what else can I do? What else could I have done, but act?" She stares at her reflection, and it glares back at her, its brow knit together, pale eyes burning with such a rage that dares her to look away. "How could I have just let the suffering they brought continue, even if it meant dooming us all instead? Maybe none of it was the best thing I could've done. Maybe none of it was enough."

Caladbolg, at her side, thrums.

"And I never wanted anyone to call me a hero." She places a hand on its hilt, feels the thorn's familiar bark beneath her fingertips. She had wielded it before too, in her first year of life, a long time ago now, after she'd taken it back from an unruly human. "But the world keeps tumbling, and someone has to do what they can to catch it."

Lucilaeh rises to her feet. Her reflection's rage gives way to something she can't name. Passion, perhaps, as Kasmeer might call it. Or resolve of the heroic variety, Canach would say. Something like that.

"C'mon Glory," she calls to her raptor, "Let's get back to work."

***

Several battles and a reunion with Braham later, Palawa Joko laughs in her face and calls her a villain and Lucilaeh can't quite answer on account of being bound by his magic.

But she certainly knows what she'd tell him.

***

That war ends, as they always do.

This time it takes a dragon eating a lich, which promptly throws Elona into some chaos.

Kralkatorrik's threat still looms, but there'll be meetings and conferences and humans trying to come together in the next few weeks. Perhaps it's selfish of her to disappear for a little bit, but she takes the first airship back to Lion's Arch after asking Rytlock to hold the fort. She'll be back soon, but there's somewhere she hasn't gone in a while, so a trip and an Asura gate later, and she's stepping back into the familiar air of the Grove just as the first colors of dawn crest the forest's treetops.

Lucilaeh wanders, and finds not much of the Grove has changed. At this hour, there are only handfuls of Sylvari out and about: nightbloom Wardens patrolling, fresh sprouts exploring, or those who simply prefer the night. Her steps take her to Trahearne's memorial, and as always, the more she nears it, the heavier Caladbolg feels at her waist.

She pauses a short distance away, gazes up at the likeness. Almost five years on, and she still finds it difficult to think of him without remembering the way dragon magic had consumed him from within. How would he have handled the wars that came after Mordremoth, she wonders? The humans and their gods, in particular—could Trahearne have changed something there? And, selfishly, what would he have thought of the vines on her head?

But perhaps she just misses him, as much as she misses the many she has lost that are dear to her heart. Would that they could have seen the Tyria she is fighting for now...

Lucilaeh shakes her head, turns away, and makes for the grand garden she has long called home. There, she greets M.O.X., then wanders the winding paths. It's strange to move without purpose for once, without some grand goal spurring her onward endlessly.

Not much has changed within Dreamer's Terrace, but many of the flowers have been growing and she knows that, should she ask, they would whisper to her the many things she has missed. But they are not quite awake yet, down here where the sun does not reach too well past the long branches of the Pale Tree—and she makes a mental note to visit—the flowers sleepily rise from their nighttime slumber.

Walking on this familiar soil, so near to the mother, Lucilaeh finds a strange calm washing over her. There are no burdens of the world on her here: no dragons and gods and liches to battle; no ministers and councillors and politics to navigate.

It is just her and the flowers and, as she rounds a corner and comes face to face with its majestic stature rising from a bed of forest leaves, the White Stag.

The Stag looks to her and, when she starts to approach, bows to her. Its antlers have only grown in her time away, and she wonders if any of the magic released by the dragons have reached it here. She wonders, as it rises again to its full height, if Aurene would be friends with it should she ever have the chance to introduce them. Lucilaeh steps close, and it leans its head toward her, touching her cheek with its muzzle. She reaches up to pet it and feels a kind warmth emanate from where she touches it, one that spreads from her fingers and her cheek to the rest of her. You're home, it tells her.

She smiles, rests her cheek against it, closes her eyes as she enjoys its quiet companionship.

"Good morning, old friend," she tells it, "I've had a very long night."

#path of fire #gw2 fanfic #living world season 4 #lucilaeh #my writing

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