#s'seri loh

[coreshorts]

Stars

It was long-in-coming, she had thought. They had put so much work toward this goal, this answer. The door that stood for millennia at the farthest northern reaches of Eorzea had been the goal of O’byahta Odah’s most recent venture, and it was Hali’s first self-given trial as a Blue Mage. It would also be her last.

So much, she thought, had been given in the pursuit of that goal. Lives, time, sanity, blood, all given in the name of what she thought, at first, was coin. There had always been others there, doing much the same: searching, fighting, possibly even dying. But, in the end, it was she and those she followed who triumphed. Rather, it would have been, if “triumph” was even the word. Was it? She couldn’t be sure. It certainly didn’t feel that way at all. It felt hollow.

It had started simply enough: a call to arms by the Outriders, by Byahta, for those same people who went to slay a creature they had called the Nucklavee, a task thought impossible in the wake of horrible curses and impossible odds. Just fresh out of the Games of Glory as its Champion, Hali was eager to prove herself as a capable adventurer. She didn’t know just the depth of what she’d just entered... but on she went, ignorantly and happily throwing pretence aside in the name of... she didn’t even know. Was it pride that drove her, or just an overwhelming need to prove herself to herself?

Whatever the case, a long ride north had them setting up camp in a stretch of ruins, interspersed throughout the land, overshadowed by a great door the likes of which she had never seen before. The shadow it cast was long, but the darkness that lay beyond was something she’d never expected.

Night after night, morning after morning, dusk and dawn alike tore at her mind. The world, the very fabric of reality screamed, and it hurt like nothing she’d ever felt. Even the pain of the Immortals’ trials paled in comparison. At times, she lost herself, giggling madly as some sick prank played by her mind, others devolving into a crying heap of aethersick convulsions. She weathered it, at times for weeks straight in the name of guarding their rented aetheryte.

Their investigations were long and arduous. Ruins after ruins, each of which had their own story to tell, as night after night, after the mind-shattering aetheric “event”, as Byahta had begun to call it, the dusk would bring scenes as if from a play, the same each night, that drew out scores of soldiers and their commanders to war. Knights and commanders and armies wearing the opposed mantles of Day and Night, their clashes titanic in power. The very aether given off made Hali’s skin crawl as she watched.

As time went on, they understood more, and at the same time, so much less. They encountered an Examplar of Night, with whom they attempted to parley, only to be locked in fierce combat - a fight they lost, their lives only saved by the grace of the night’s fall ending the strange rift in time. 

Another had them speaking peacefully with a pair of brothers faced with an impossible decision: one or the other must die for a decision to be made and peace to be had. If peace could not be reached between the two armies, they had found, the Allagans would surely wipe them out. A coinflip decided the ancient decision, and time and time again it had failed due to assassins, which the company was forced, eventually, to face in order to make the decision last. At the end, a relic stood unbroken which empowered the door, they believed. They marked it as progress.

They met an ancient dragoon who, though at first determined to stop them, to end the threat they posed to everything for which he was sworn, became an ally, if only even briefly, after a long and deep conversation about choices and taking one’s fate into one’s own hands. Let your people die in agony, or be cursed, but live on? Both sides had made their choice, and it was a heavy burden borne by each side. Hali had not been there, of course. Looking back, she wished she was, rather than lamenting her own faults and downfalls to a beastman with no understanding of such complex things. But she, like the soldiers, had a duty, and it was to the runes she had practised, nearly perfected, so that the others could always return safely. At the end, the others had escorted a palanquin back to a designated spot where the next relic was restored. They marked it, too, as progress.

They had investigated a fort next, which had, they had discovered, sunk beneath the waves in a desperate battle with the Allagan Empire thousands of years before. Once again, they met a commander of Dusk when the event shifted time, and they witnessed as the fortress quaked and rattled, shades of Allagan soldiers attacking and cutting down Night and Day alike in their wake. They fought hard, but by that point, the strain it had all put on Hali had begun weakening her. The aether events, the attempts at Blue Magic that she barely understood, she felt something in her dying, and it scared her. A knife tore her open from the back, and she lost consciousness, until she awoke to one of the group, carrying her, a potion bringing her back around. They fought Allagan constructs, and watched as the Door, so far in the distance, blazed, prompting questions that had no time to be answered as they continued to pursue the Knight who seemed to know all too well where he was going...

When at last they met, it was a pained discussion, very nearly a heated debate, over whether it was better to let his people die or to keep them trapped in a repeating nightmare, dying time and time again, going through the same thing every night. Most of them forgot. The Knight always remembered. A thing like would drive a person mad, Hali thought, and even though his insistence on perpetuating the nightmare enraged her, her experience with madness, with despair, with such fear... she felt it all in him. He threatened her with meaning. In a mission of shapes and noise, she wanted to cry as she watched blood seep from his armour as he desperately tried to hold back the tide of destruction, the Locus, his source of power and, ironically, one for the door he had once hoped to destroy to save his people, fuelling a last ditch attempt, just like every night, to stop the collapse until the scene played its course and night fell true. When it did, Byahta posited that they search the ruins beneath the waves, and, surely enough, they found the Locus: a broken, long-forgotten blade with barely a spark of aether left to it. It was progress, once more, but what was about to happen was almost beyond comprehension.

Like a woman possessed, Byahta had rushed for the Door that stood so tall above all else in that vast stretch of land. The linkshell went mad as the woman left to guard the crystal called out in concern... and then fled when she had heard of Byahta’s mad dash. As the Locus completed its ritual and the Door began to open, Byahta was held back by an otherworldly force like a massive dark hand plucking her from the ground and restraining her.

“Gyuhuhuhu...” a dark voice cackled to her, “You do not get to make this journey.”

Standing before the door, then, after so many had come and gone were Hali, the Outriders’ leader Naomi Kett, the monk T’rahven, swordscale Ryuka Yumitori, the Protector Kazukata Go, and the Dark Lancer Shadow Shouvome. As it began to close, it was Hali who had begun running first, her strength failing, but her sheer determination to have this finally done and finished forcing her forward. It had to end. She would find out how to make it end.

On the other side of the door was another world to its own, a mirror of their own. It was silent, empty, hollow, and before them stood a single figure. Battered, beaten, but not yet truly broken, the old and weathered blade of a soldier of Night clutched in his hand. Before him lay several similar weapons, all driven into the ground like grave markers. Words were exchanged. They made Hali want to scream, to cry, to yell in anger. The Outriders wanted so badly for him to join them in their fight against the voidsent monstrosity who, they believed, had set it all in motion, but it was over. It had long been over. The Door was a weapon as much as it was an escape, and everything behind them, with its closing, was not only closed off to them, but blasted in to what they thought may well have been oblivion.

The words continued, but the Exemplar, called Lun, had been trapped with naught but ghosts, time, and a vast stretch of emptiness until, as he had said, “even their dust [was] dust.” It pained her. To be chained to something so hopeless, so meaningless, for so long tore at her. She felt things she never wanted to feel, never could comprehend, and yet still felt, and it made her want to scream, even as she struggled to stay standing. She took a step forward and offered herself, first. He wanted a fight. He was doomed anyway, with the opening of the door, and so he would go out in accordance with his duty. He would fight and be slain, but he would fight.

It was no glorious battle. It was a struggle for one man, one dying knight against six weary adventurers, brought to and beyond the precipice of oblivion through time and despair alone, to make one final stand against something that was so clearly meaningless. All he knew was gone. There was never any hope, never a chance, and so he fought. He fought, despite it all. He attacked and was attacked. He fell, meeting the earth of the mirror-world time and time again, but each time, rose with another wound leaking sand, as if that was all time had left of him, in some cruel joke. At the last of it, he staggered for the weapons that, during the course of the desperate final stand, had begun to glow.

Hali felt nothing. She hadn’t the strength to feel. The pain of her own failing body, her writhing, agonised soul, and her mind, wrung into complete dissociation by the trauma of trying to relate to such a torturous fate, trying to understand such a desperate struggle, for all of them, it all became nothing for a brief moment, and she joined Kazukata in a final rush to run him through before he could finish them, Ryuka blocking his path and keeping him from proceeding further.

At the end, he was nothing but armour and dust, fading into obscurity as the door opened once more, no longer bound by the single man tethered to it in a desperate bid to do anything he could against the tide of inevitability that awaited him. There was nothing. It was no victory. It was hollow. It hurt. It had brought the would-be Blue Mage to her limits, and then pushed her over. She felt as though she would die. She expected to. She did not.

When they returned to the base camp, their whole path littered with the suddenly-returned ruins of a long-dead civilisation, the ground, stone, mountains, and more scorched from the Door’s power, they found Byahta and S’seri Loh. The two green-haired miqo’te, paired with their strange dolls, awaited the company of adventurers, the latter having been tasked for some weeks with guarding their precious aetheryte, much to her own dismay. Byahta was battered and broken, looking not only concussed but entirely uncharacteristic. She spoke in an old dialect, where she was normally mute, turning some heads, before they all went their own ways, Byahta and Naomi using the aerthyte to return home, and the rest packing up camp to make the long ride back on their own.

It felt so much longer than the ride there, and even that had taken days. Most of the time, Hali remained either asleep or despondent, staring silently forward along the long path. She had nothing to say. There was nothing she wanted to say. There was nothing she could say without crying, without screaming, or without simply failing to find the words she needed. The nights were especially harsh, seeming darker, almost less hospitable to her. She wondered why. Had it been because of what they had unknowingly completed? Were they all so scorned? It hurt to think about, and so she didn’t, attributing it only to her weakness. 

Kel’s offer to train her in the arts of the shinobi were a sure thing for her. She couldn’t continue on this path. The Immortals were no more interested in teaching her than they were in trying to kill one another for reasons she barely understood. The magic was killing her, slowly, she felt. This venture made her realise that. It had to end. She would be better on her own. This would be the start... but first, she had to recover. She had so much to think about, so much crying to do, and just so very much to take in.

It would take time before she could truly come to terms with her Memories of Stars.

(( This short serves as a personal recounting of @obyahta-odah‘s fantastic Memories of Stars storyline from the perspective, of course, of my character, Hali Naras. I can’t possibly do it justice with a single short, but here we are. It was an absolute treat and I’m glad to have been part of it. ))

[for-gold-and-glory]

List of Weekly Events Nov 13-Nov19th

Here are some events G&G Members will be involved in during the week. Or just events that I think are really cool and you should definitely go to. If you’re interested in joining these events show up or send a message to Aegir Hlerson or Lirilith Maellan. Or join our discord: https://discord.gg/cJThDqD Monday: Lominsan Fight Club @ 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EST -  Lominsan Lominsa Lower Decks (x9, y15) Monday: S’seri’s Ventures: The Cold March @ 10:00PM EST - Forgotten Springs Wednesday: Bountiful Chest Tavern @ 8:00 PM EST - Goblet, Ward 6, Plot 5 Thursday: G&G RP: The Killing Zu @ 8:00 PM EST   Friday: Garlean RP: Training Day @ 7:00 PM EST Coerthas Central Highlands Saturday: Confederate RP: Divine Moth Mothra PT2 @ 10:00 PM EST Sunday:  Quench Your Palette @ 7:00 PM EST Mist Ward 6, Apt 32 Subdivisions  Brimming Heart Harvest Market @ 8:00 PM EST  Goblet Ward 10 Brimming Heart  

Monday: Lominsan Fight Club @ 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EST -  Lominsan Lominsa Lower Decks (x9, y15) http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=15749 GM: Lominsa Fight Club Status: Open World Community RP Event (please check event page for rules) Monday: S'Seri’s Ventures: The Cold March.  10:00 PM EST @ Forgotten Springs - A Combat Focused RP, featuring Adventuring at the forefront Open To Anyone “Hunting money, one bandit, skeleton, and deadly trap at a time.” http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=20855 GM: S’seri Loh Status: Open to anyone, contact S’seri for more information Wednesday: Bountiful Chest Tavern @ 8:00 PM EST - Goblet, Ward 6, Plot 5 https://goldandglory-fc.wixsite.com/the-bountiful-chest -  Welcome to the Bountiful Chest, the Gold and Glory Adventuring Company's premier restaurant and lounge! Situated in the Goblet, we are just around the bend from prosperous Ul'dah, and situated to serve not only the most humble of adventurers, but the most illustrious and prosperous of the elite! Status: Open World RP GM: Hali Naras

Thursday: G&G RP: The Killing Zu @ 8:00 PM EST   https://tinyurl.com/ycqbltaq -EGADS! A request has been sent to the stalwart employees of the Gold and Glory! It appears that a wild Zu has been rampaging far outside of it's natural habitat, and has been raiding the lands of coerthas! Peasant and cattle have been snatched up and consumed, and the temple knights have not the manpower to spare in contending with this threat! Status: Open to all adventurers and anyone interested! GM: Aedwen Tyrer Friday: Garlean RP: Training Day @ 7:00 PM EST Coerthas Central Highlands https://fustuarium.tumblr.com/ - Mandatory training for IIIrd Legion Cohorts and members of Fustarium. Look forward to a special guest trainer. Status: Open to all Garlean RPers GM: Ohohoho Saturday: Confederate RP: Divine Moth Mothra PT2 @ 10:00 PM EST  -Yaxnia - The cocoon has hatched. This will be a fight on the land, sea, and in the air!  Sunday:  Quench Your Palette @ 7:00 PM EST Mist Ward 6, Apt 32 Subdivisions https://quenchyourpalette.tumblr.com/post/167317174340/fliers-have-begun-to-show-up-on-the-walls-in -  Fliers have begun to show up on the walls in Ul’dah, Limsa Lominsa and Gridania. The colorful paper appears to be handmade, or at least painted with watercolors, and the script has been done with very deliberate hand. GM:  Moengeim Bhalnwyn Status: Please check link for more information Brimming Heart Harvest Market @ 8:00 PM EST  Goblet Ward 10 Brimming Heart   http://bandeepakshee.tumblr.com/post/167169960270/join-bandee-pakshee-for-a-street-market-in-the Join Bandee Pakshee for a street market in the Brimming Heart! Traditional harvest festival fare and a bit of spice and sweetness from Thavnair will blend to make a wonderful bazaar and celebration of the hard work so many have done all year. GM: Bandee Pakshee Status: please check the link for more information No Weekly G&G Event today because there’s a bunch of other crap to do!

[for-gold-and-glory]

List of Weekly Events Nov 6th - Nov 12th

Here are some events G&G Members will be involved in during the week. Or just events that I think are really cool and you should definitely go to. If you’re interested in joining these events show up or send a message to Aegir Hlerson or Lirilith Maellan. Or join our discord: https://discord.gg/cJThDqD Monday: Lominsan Fight Club @ 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EST -  Lominsan Lominsa Lower Decks (x9, y15) Monday: S’seri’s Ventures: The Cold March @ 10:00PM EST - Forgotten Springs Tuesday: Thursday: Confederate RP: Divine Moth Mothra @ 9:00PM EST - Ruby Sea/Yanxia Friday: Garlean RP: Girls Night Out @ 8:00 PM EST - Castrum Aquilonis Saturday: G&G Weekly Event: Back to Ul’dah @ 8:30 PM EST - FC House Goblet W6, P5 Sunday: Garlean Weekly RP: “Who are you?” @ 3:00pm EST - Castrum Aquilonis Sunday: Sea Breeze Bazaar @ 5:00PM EST to 8:00 - Moraby Drydocks

Monday: Lominsan Fight Club @ 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EST -  Lominsan Lominsa Lower Decks (x9, y15) http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=15749 GM: Lominsa Fight Club Status: Open World Community RP Event (please check event page for rules) Monday: S'Seri's Ventures: The Cold March.  10:00 PM EST @ Forgotten Springs - A Combat Focused RP, featuring Adventuring at the forefront Open To Anyone "Hunting money, one bandit, skeleton, and deadly trap at a time." http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=20855 GM: S’seri Loh Status: Open to anyone, contact S’seri for more information Thursday: Confederate RP: Divine Moth Mothra @ 9:00PM EST - Ruby Sea/Yanxia - A pair of mysterious twins have been seen roaming in the mists. They sing an alluring song and then... suck out their aether! Are these ordinary Ayakashi? Or could they be perhaps related to the mysterious mist surrounded to the Moon Gates. And... is that a giant cocoon over there? GM: Aegir Hlerson Status: Open to all adventurers, researchers, citizens of Yanxia, Confederates, Onmyoji, and roaming Xaela! Friday: Garlean RP: Girls Night Out @ 8:00 PM EST - Castrum Aquilonis https://fustuarium.tumblr.com/ - It’s time for a lady’s night out! A group from the IIIrd Legion hit the town for a night away from the dumb ass men. GM: Araceli Caillen Status: Open to all female Garlean RPers Saturday: G&G Weekly Event: Back to Ul’dah @ 8:30 PM EST - FC House Goblet W6, P5 - It’s been a long summer, but the adventurers are finally back in Thanalan. And what’s this? The house got an upgrade! Wait, that’s not the same house! It’s in a different ward. And it’s a mansion! It’s time for a BLESSING ceremony! Party to follow. GM: Aegir Hlerson and Araceli Caillen Status: Open to all G&G members, members of the thaumaturge guild, and anyone who wants to come get boozed up with cheap drinks. Sunday: Garlean Weekly RP: “Who are you?” @ 3:00pm EST - Castrum Aquilonis - It’s time for a PURGE! The target is mal Helios, a Physicus who has been doing BAD science. And you know it’s BAD when the Empire isn’t willing to tolerate it. Sneak into his underground lab, assassinate the target, and BURN his research. GM: Aegir Hlerson Status: Open to all Fustarium members Sunday: Sea Breeze Bazaar @ 5:00PM EST to 8:00 - Moraby Drydocks http://seabreezebazaar.tumblr.com/ In need of a method to quickly unload your wares? Storage getting a little too full? Mayhaps you are alternatively looking for that perfect accompaniment to your outfit, or a rare weapon to sunder the very skies themselves? Then pray, look no further. We here at the Sea Breeze Bazaar pride ourselves with playing host to whatever your heart might desire! GM: Sea Breeze Bazaar Status: Open World Community RP Event (please check event page for rules)