#stealth edit i realized i fucked up the tense at some point OTL

[fistsoflightning]

servant of death

ffxivwrite2023 05: BARBAROUS mercilessly harsh or cruel

lumelle’s having a really bad day. sorry. that’s on me. lumelle & emet-selch. 3401 wc.

i’m not sure how to warn for this, exactly? but CW for discussion & most of the actual task for what the carers for end-of-life patients at the inn do. i don’t think it’s worse than the SHB MSQ alisaie side but. yanno.

He was back again. Much to Lumelle’s personal dismay, he always seemed to appear whenever Alisaie left her side to go on patrol, which made it impossible to fully convince Alisaie of the presence of an Ascian—a Paragon—this close to the crystallized Flood of Light. At least he didn’t seem interested in doing harm to anything other than Lumelle’s sanity, and at least his presence here in the kitchen meant he wasn’t off harassing A’dewah in the carer’s dormitory.

Lumelle took a deep breath, and looked away from Emet-Selch sitting on the kitchen counter beside her cutting board as if he were Elwin and not a full-grown man in a hoity-toity, heat-trapping robe.

“Get off the counter before I decide to chop off your fingers and use them as eater bait tomorrow,” she said evenly, gripping the bone handle of the knife in her hands tight as she continued to cut up the last harcot for the topping.

“So barbaric,” Emet-Selch sneered, but he did get off the counter, if only to loom over Lumelle as she continued her work. Lumelle had never particularly begrudged her Elezen-typical growth spurt not happening on time or quickly—even now she was only a few ilms taller than she was two years ago—except for when he did that just because he knew she hated it. “And even beyond your propensity to threaten violence and enact it, you seek to kill your friends before they become foe. Hardly becoming behavior for a hero such as yourself.”

“Whatever, Solus.” Lumelle took the biggest chunks of the harcot that didn’t look mangled and set them aside on a plate—the rest she stuffed into her mouth and chewed angrily before she wiped off her hands and turned to pry open the lid of icebox. The rule she had set for herself repeated in her head: don’t let the Ascian win. He wants you to flip out.

Emet-Selch didn’t seemed so easily deterred today—or was it tonight? His shadow fell over her as she got the heavy, ill-fitting lid off the icebox and pulled out the chilled jelly with its accompanying jar of lemonette syrup. “I thought you would leave the dubious honor of such dirty work like cooking to your fellows. That Hume girl, if not your precious Scion. Feeling guilty, mayhap?”

She swallowed some of the harcot—made a reminder to herself to ask Rhon Ron if he had any more left to sell, because these were really good—and looked up at him. “You’re in my way. If you really want to observe, get out of the kitchen.”

His face twisted lightly with—disgust, maybe? Lumelle couldn’t really tell; he looked at everything like that, save maybe when Lumelle caught flashes of him watching her cut through swathes of sin eaters, sitting bored in the distance with a stare sharper than any blade. Whatever it was, it was only there for a fleeting moment before he moved towards the kitchen doorway and said, “Do finish chewing before you say anything else. I have the time.”

“My etiquette teachers would say the same,” she said, mouth still half-full. Don’t bow your head; keep breathing normally. She put the lid back on the icebox, hoping whoever needed it next would be able to get it open, set the jelly and the jar to the counter, and then pulled out the key to the locked drawer she’d borrowed from Tesleen. “I used to listen to them—when I was seven.”

Emet-Selch scoffed. “And how long ago was that, three years?”

Lumelle snorted—she might have been angrier, if she’d not spent most of her childhood expected to hold herself in a manner befitting a full-grown lady of the house and now found being childish almost refreshing at times—and stuck out her tongue at him with her smile oddly stretched from the lump of harcot she was holding in her cheek. The petty joy of getting someone incomprehensibly ancient to stoop to arguing with her was about the biggest win she was going to get out of parleying with Emet-Selch.

“Still here?” she asked, twirling the key on her finger. Usually Emet-Selch would scoff and disappear back into the aether after Lumelle got him to stoop to playing along with her conversation instead of whatever he wanted.

Not now, though.

Emet-Selch snapped his fingers, and a chair appeared beside the doorway for him to sit in, crossing one leg over the other. “Of course,” he said, that perfectly-rehearsed smile that reminded Lumelle of the lords and ladies back home settling onto his face. “I meant what I said—I have plenty of time to chat. It’s not as if you Scions have made any dent in my plans, and at the moment I find this part of the ruined star particularly intriguing to watch.”

Lumelle swallowed the rest of the harcot to keep from frowning. She didn’t want Emet-Selch to see the contents of the carer’s kitchen drawer, but she had little choice in the matter; he really was intent on seeing this part of Lumelle’s misery through.

She should have just stabbed him when he approached her after that cursed sin eater hunt, no white auracite be damned.

Unlike everything else in the Inn’s kitchen, this drawer still worked almost as well as the day it was built. She slid the key into the lock and turned it without needing to use her strength like earlier with the icebox, and opened the drawer to see the contents split evenly between the carer’s stock. The glass bottles clattered with the movement, some rolling around freely. Lumelle’s eyes drifted to the folded piece of paper underneath the vials on her right.

She reached in and pulled it out. Unfolded it.

Dosage suggestions based on food type, amount, & patient body weight.

“And lo, the valiant knight turns her blade against those she swore to protect.” Emet-Selch sounded so damn smug, narrating from his shitty little chair; maybe he’d done it before from his throne in Garlemald. Lumelle wanted nothing more than to get her sword and pin him to it through the stomach. “Mayhap a situation not so unfamiliar. I recall Ishgard determining her heretics based on a whim quite often.”

Lumelle bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood, the juice from the harcot still sticky on her tongue making it sting. “I never swore anything. Stop talking so loud,” she grit out. Which carer wrote this? They had the smallest handwriting Lumelle had ever seen, so teensy she almost felt the need to squint to read it. In liquids & syrups, one-fourth jar, 100 to 115 po—

Emet-Selch kept talking at her. “An oathless knight. How pitiful. Even the knights of Voeburt at least had some civility and honor about them,” he said. “Though I suppose what little honor you had left you over a moon ago.”

“I’ll show you honor,” she muttered, wrinkling the slightly-yellowed paper between her fingers from how hard she was pressing them together. She hated this—she hated him. What did she ever—why did it have to be—why couldn’t he just go bother—

Lumelle rubbed her eyes hard with her free hand when the letters on the page blurred and tried to hide the moisture on her wrist, pretending it was irritation from the light sandstorm. No. This was fine. An Ascian? Psh. He could be doing this to A’dewah, and then she’d feel so much worse. He could be in the Crystarium with Elwin and she wouldn’t even know, but he was here.

She could be making lemon waffles instead of jellied harcot. She could be standing over a grave wondering how she was ever going to look at Alphinaud ever again. Maybe she was still really mad at her, but at least she was here. At least she could still—

I was fine! You should have stuck to the plan! Do you not trust me?!

“Having second thoughts?”

“About thinking you had anything important to say, ever? Oh, sure,” Lumelle snarked, reaching into the drawer for the right bottle only to pause when the glass frosted over near where her fingers were. After a moment she grabbed it anyway, barely feeling the glass in her palm, and hooked the ring of measuring spoons on her pinky before she shut the drawer with her hip.

“Please,” Emet-Selch drawled, his voice practically dripping with venom. Lumelle wondered, briefly, how Urianger’s research into making white auracite with Il Mheg’s prismstone was going. “Everything I say and have said is naught but the unvarnished truth.”

That was what Lumelle hated the most. She took one last look at the chart before she folded it back up, looked straight at him, and said, “It’s certainly not winning you any points with me. Would it kill you to be kinder about it?”

As those last few words left her mouth, she knew at once that she’d fucked up.

“Hah. Kinder, like you believe yourself to be?” Emet-Selch gestured to his side, hand waving through the doorway and down the hall leading to the patient’s ward. “A sugary lie will not suddenly make you a hero, nor stop the Light’s work. You chose to leave the girl’s side. You chose to abandon the plot laid out by your dear. You chose to leave her like this—allowed her the long defeat of transformation rather than swift mercy at your hand. And now you will prove yourself cruel yet again—at her weakest, you will deliver her poison and end her. What kindness could ever reach something as awful as you?”

Her vision blurred again as she looked down at the counter before her, where she put the vial of poison and the measuring spoons. In her mind, she knew she couldn’t take anything he said to heart, that he only wanted to hurt her for whatever dark purpose he was here for. He had done it before, out on the sands when she’d stayed behind to make sure the horde would stay away, and Lumelle had let him. She had let him now, too. She thought she was ready for it this time.

It hurt more than the force of that dhruva-shaped sin eater’s crystals slamming into her when she’d chosen to protect Alisaie over Tista-Rae; the hurt swallowed her, so large and there that she couldn’t decide whether to get angry and scream and rage or cry or curl up into a ball about it before she was there again.

The hunt.

The Inn at Journey’s Head was essentially a field hospital. Lumelle had followed Alisaie here after the Exarch brought them and Elwin across the rift, and she’d known by the end of their first day that they wouldn’t hold up against any real force. She’d heard of bigger Ishgardian encampments getting burned to the ground by hordes of aevis and diresaurs and biasts before anyone could call for the Knights Dragoon, and they didn’t make new dragons every time they killed. She and Alisaie could do some real damage, especially with A’dewah there to back them up, and some of the carers knew the basics and acted as guards—but the sin eaters. The hordes they would hear about, sometimes, at Mord Souq when they were getting groceries.

Lumelle might have been raised in Ishgard and faced off her own hordes for her city, sure. This world still found new ways to scare her.

Tista-Rae had smiled and told her to keep her chin up. To keep doing what she was doing, culling as many sin eaters as she could on patrol with Alisaie. She’d come from the Crystarium when Lumelle had written a strongly worded request to the Exarch with a few others and said she’d get the carers swinging swords like Lumelle in no time. She’d even made time in her day to help the patients get more active, fighting off that plastery stiffness awaiting them the only way she knew how.

They still weren’t ready, when it was clear they had to go hunt the largest group down. There were so many.

In the sea of white-white-white, Lumelle didn’t have the time to figure out which sin eaters were the really bad ones, the ones that could turn people, which meant she was just cutting through as many as she could. She was sweating through the scarf tied over her face to keep the dust and ichor from getting in her lungs, her mouth. Someone was screaming. Their line had been pushed back to forty yalms from the Inn. Tista-Rae and the Crystarium dispatch were fighting with her, in the center of it; her sword was almost glowing full white and dripping when she looked over her shoulder back to A’dewah and Alisaie.

She didn’t even remember what she saw, what was happening, if Alisaie was actually in as much danger as Lumelle thought—only that she felt the panic take her and ran towards them, Tista-Rae shouting her name, and didn’t get her shield up in time to block the crystals. The one that would have hit Alisaie hit her instead. Thank Hydaelyn for the Blessing of Light.

And at the end, after Lumelle had dove back in to finish her job slightly worse for wear, Tista-Rae had ruffled her hair and said, I getcha. Just give a girl a warning next time, hm?

Her arm was bleeding, Lumelle remembered. She’d wrapped it up with a ripped-off piece of her Elven partner’s cape. She wasn’t wearing her Crystarium guard chainmail because she had to send it back for repairs.

She’d been doing well. Tista-Rae had been smiling and laughing and dancing for a week or two after. Lumelle almost believed it.

Then she’d got sick so fast.

The other carers were worried it had been from ichor poisoning, but Lumelle knew. Not how she was okay for so long—but she knew the bandages in the bins were hers, knew her sword hand was her left and not her right even if she was ambidextrous, knew it was—what she could have—!

She came back to herself and chose anger.

Lumelle slammed her hands down on the counter, hearing the spice bottles rattle. Pain lanced up the heels of her hands and up her arms.

“Maybe what I’ve done and haven’t done is cruel. Maybe I’m cruel,” she spat, refusing to look at Emet-Selch again and feeling that same impossible coldfire in her stomach as she did facing the Warriors of Darkness, listening to J’rhoomale speak so easily of poisoning Alisaie and then daring to shoot at Elwin when Lumelle was right there, “but it’s a damn lot kinder to give them a chance to die as themselves rather than sit there, knowing their body will transform painfully and their mind will shatter from the twist, and do nothing but wait to let it happen.”

She waited for Emet-Selch to find his next venomous arrow, for the fire that drove her to drink dragon’s blood to be fed. Waited for the pain to come again.

When the silence kept stretching longer and longer like caramel strings, Lumelle opened up the jar of lemonette syrup—she bent the metal lid in her hand and winced—and measured out the right dose with shaking hands. If he said anything else, she really might do something bad, so maybe it was for the best.

The rest she did feeling distant from herself, every glass and metal thing she touched frosting over; the poison went into the jar, a spoon came out from another drawer, clattered on the jar’s rim as she mixed the contents in a rush. The syrup didn’t look any different as her hands poured it over the jelly already in its dish, and probably didn’t taste any different; the carers said the Crystarium put extra work into making it tasteless for them. Lumelle, knowing Tehra’ir personally, wasn’t as certain, but she didn’t want to think about everyone’s last meal never getting to taste right.

Only when she was putting the harcot slices on the top did she remember Emet-Selch’s unusual quiet.

She looked up again, setting the spoon into the jelly dish with a clatter, and found the Ascian staring blankly up at her… or through her? Whatever Emet-Selch was seeing, it wasn’t her or her anger; he might as well have been on another shard.

She just had to walk through the door and she’d be fifteen steps away from Tista-Rae’s cot, another ten to her longsword, but Lumelle knew better than to turn her back to an enemy—much less an Ascian—unarmed and alone.

“Well? No more ‘truth’ left in you?” Lumelle leaned forward to prop her elbow on the counter to hold up her head, feeling more furious and vitriolic and awful the longer Emet-Selch sat there staring a hole in the side of her head. Something about his face seemed so… wrong. “Say something, damn you. Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?”

It was as if he suddenly wanted to shatter everything Lumelle knew about him. He opened his mouth, eyes refocusing on her, but no words came. His mouth shut, and his once smug expression now looked like he was angry. Like he had any right to be.

Without so much as another word, he raised his hand, and with a wave he disappeared.

Well. At least she could let her eyes brim over with tears in peace now.

“Damn that bastard. Damn this stupid shard. Damn the Light,” she muttered, sniffling and trying to wipe all her tears away as they came only for them to freeze on her hands. Her anger shoved up against something in her heart and turned into the deep need to curl up in bed and spend the rest of the day crying, but she still had a dessert to deliver. Usually Alisaie or Elwin helped her pull herself back together, but Alisaie was still so mad at her and Elwin didn’t even know how bad a day she’d been having, from the carers telling her it was Tista-Rae’s time to go and Alisaie arguing with her to Emet-fucking-Selch showing his stupid face here.

What was that rhyme Tesleen told her about, again?

Warrior of Darkness, servant of death, take care of our souls at our dying breath...

“Let sinners and eaters of sin go with thee.” Lumelle sniffled a few more times, cringing at how awful her voice sounded now. Did she actually yell earlier? She hoped she didn’t. Elwin always said—he said that she got scary when she yelled now, after the whole thing with the real Warriors of Darkness back home. That turning into a dragon for a little bit might not have actually been for just a little bit. “That all may return to the sunless sea.”

She took another deep breath. Exhaled.

Could a Warrior of Light be gentle about death? Could she?

Her hands were hurting from how cold they were, she realized; she brushed her frozen tears off onto the tiles. There wasn’t really a mirror anywhere in the Inn, as no one wanted any of the patients to accidentally see themselves, panic, and possibly turn, so she’d just have to hope she looked acceptable. Carefully, so she didn’t break anything else today, she picked up the jellied harcot in one hand and walked through the kitchen doorway. Emet-Selch left his little chair—it was actually padded, he’d put that much thought into it—so she grabbed it with her other hand and dragged it with her.

Fifteen steps, and she was by Tista-Rae’s bedside. Her dusty-pink hair was down from her bun, turning white at the roots and the tips, and her eyes struggled to focus on Lumelle when she turned the chair around and sat down next to her.

“Hey,” Lumelle said past the lump in her throat. Her hands and her voice didn’t shake as she watched Tista-Rae smile up at her distantly, nor when Tista-Rae glanced at the chilled glass in Lumelle’s hands and her eyes cleared, just slightly, in realization; she refused to let them. She had to face this with her eyes afraid and awake, even if it hurt. “Sorry I took so long. Are—are you feeling up for dessert?”