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Contrary to popular opinion, Aymeric wasn’t opposed to sleep.
He knew of the common mindset, of course. The people of Ishgard, seeing only the version of him that he presented in public, fully believed that he worked relentlessly for his cause, never stopping to take time for such mundane things as eating, or sleeping. He’d heard every version of the joke, and it had even gone as far as the other city-states, with Alliance leaders gently teasing him about how they’d not bothered to prepare any rooms for him, seeing as he wouldn’t need them anyway.
Ultimately, he was unbothered. If these were among the worst rumours that could circulate about him, surely that could only be a positive sign. Besides, rare were the few who dared to bring it up to his face; whatever new trappings and titles their fragile new government had attempted to place upon him, those who served Ishgard still saw him as their Lord Commander. A certain degree of respect was still present.
A subtle worry frequently lurked in Lucia’s eyes in regards to it all, of course. She’d known him for longer than most, and knew when a secret was being withheld from her. She read that secret as his overwork and sleeplessness, and he hadn’t attempted to correct her. Tact and trust kept her holding her tongue, but it didn’t stop her subtle attempts at delegation, or making sure he made it home at a reasonable hour most nights.
Aymeric allowed it all with good-natured humour. She meant well, even if she was slightly misinformed.
For it wasn’t for lack of willingness to sleep that he kept his mind busy most days, or kept him away for long stretches of time; it was to exhaust himself.
Aymeric drove himself, again and again, to the point of exhaustion, where he could collapse into bed each night and fall asleep quickly and easily, slipping away from reality for those few blessed hours. Asleep, he could close off the memories, the fears, the lingering doubts that coloured his every action to ensure it was the right path. Asleep, the responsibilities he carried through the day were withheld.
Asleep, he could dream of her.
Before, when spring still came to Coerthas, the sweeping cathedral windows would eternally shine with bright, twisting kaleidoscopes of colours. Each pane of coloured glass would catch the summer sunlight, filtering down to the warm flagstones and statues below and settling over the building’s faithful occupants like a gossamer mantle. After the Calamity struck, and winter established its rulership over the country, those who remembered its original glory mourned that the architecture’s painstaking designs were never quite at their full glory ever again.
But Aymeric remembered them, and those jewel-bright memories formed flawlessly around him as he made his way through the basilica’s arching main hall.
Motes of dust danced golden in streaked sunbeams as he walked, unhurried, following an intimately familiar path. Away from the main hall, around the intricately wrought iron partitions, and down a smaller corridor that, in life, bordered one of the courtyards, richly steeped in the reds and crimsons of the poppy flowers and flame ivy vines that flourished there.
He found her there, sitting perched up in a raised window alcove, drenched in sunshine and dappled with coloured light. She’d been waiting, and a single arched brow told him, gentle with insincere reprimand, that he was late. She turned towards him as he approached, waiting silently for him settle close in front of her, the movement as natural to him as breathing.
Her eyes on him were dark and searching, with the promise and certainty in her gaze burning through his veins and scorching all other thought. Raising one hand, she pressed two slender fingers to his throat, just firm enough to feel out the beat of his pulse. The corners of her lips twitched upwards when his pulse immediately quickened at her touch.
Aymeric drew a slow, deep breath, surrounding himself with the closeness of her. His Warrior of Light.
“You left.” He watched her face as he spoke the words, waiting to see if she’d try to find accusations in them when he only spoke simple truths.
Her gaze lifted slowly from her fingers at his throat to meet his eyes, studying them with an intensity that he’d never seen replicated in any other living creature. He would never understand how no one else seemed to have been as thoroughly ensnared by them as he had.
“I came back.” Her gaze dropped to his lips, letting her fingertips dip to lightly trace down the length of his throat, whispering lightly across his collarbone. His quiet intake of breath seemed to signal something, and she leaned forwards, just close enough to let his hands finally settle on the curve of her waist, heavy and promising.
She traded her fingertips for her hand in earnest, sliding it around the back of his neck and tangling in the dark strands of his hair to pull him close. He let his eyes fall shut, inhaling sharply, his own hands tightening their grip on her waist. In the end, when her warm mouth pressed against his own, it was impossible to know which of them had finally closed that last, infinitestimal gap between them.
His hands spoke the words his mouth was unable to, sliding around to the small of her back, inching her closer to the edge of the sill she sat propped on, pulling her flush against his chest and holding her there. She tilted her head to deepen the kiss and the world caught fire, flames crackling in between the stained glass and the sunlight. She caught her fingers in his hair, on his neck, his shoulders; anywhere her deft hands could reach, searching out better places to hold on, to drag him that much closer. Like she could disappear into him by will alone.
“I miss you.”
He shaped the truth of it against her lips like a burning brand, barely articulate and exposed like a raw nerve, but she heard him regardless. Her sharp inhale twisted a knife deep beneath his ribcage, while in the same moment she bent her knee just enough to hook one leg around his waist, pinning him against her and breathing in tandem with his increasingly frantic heartbeat. He slid his free hand down her hip, fitting his hand around the exposed sliver of warm skin at her thigh, holding her steady.
He formed the words against her mouth again and again, swallowing every answer she gave him with an urgency that flooded his chest. He moved to press reverent lips against her closed eyelids, her cheeks, her jaw. He trailed down the slender column of her throat, feeling her heartbeat pulse frantic against his mouth as he pushed her back flush against the window, crowding ever closer and yet never close enough.
I miss you…
Days were longer now, despite the limited sunlight. The looming threat of war was a state that Aymeric was intimately familiar with, but he couldn’t deny that it weighed heavier this time. It was harder to take up the mantle again, now that he knew how light the world could be.
How light she’d made it for him. For them all.
New burdens had also been added to the weight of the old, with political complexities piling up on him alongside the unspoken expectation that he would bear it as stoically as he’d ever done before. Head bowed only slightly – only privately, to those who knew how to look – before the enormity of it all, Aymeric persisted with the challenge that had been laid at his feet. This time, he found himself traveling across Eorzea for the benefit of his people, no longer confined to the city’s limitations.
If he could take any small comfort from this path he’d been directed down, it was that he could at least use his small measure of influence to leave things better than he’d found them.
Often, he slept dreamlessly when away from the city. Traveling felt closer to her, somehow; she was under a similar sky, in an equally unfamiliar bed. In another lifetime, he’d be there with her, traveling alongside her rather than meeting her on the road when their respective paths happened to cross. In that lifetime, he’d be laying awake listening to her quiet, late-night whispers of endless seas, rippling hillsides and lush forests, and of the people she’d met; so many people that it seemed she’d lived a hundred lifetimes in between each trip she made back home to him.
Instead, Aymeric found he relished nights when he was back in the city. It seemed that it was only when he was back among the familiar statues and snowdrifts that he saw her face in his dreams once more.
And after the Ghimlyt Dark, he began to leave Ishgard less frequently.
“Our champion has gone to fetch the Scions.” The message had been professional and brief, with identical copies distributed to every Alliance leader. Aymeric had read the words more times than he’d care to admit, trying to parse further detail out of each individual letter, each smudged bit of ink.
It wasn’t until later, after a brief meeting with the other city state leaders, that Krile Baldesion would give them slightly more to go off of, providing news that would creep between his ribs and settle cold and lingering around his heart; the Warrior of Light had managed to travel across the rift, was currently unharmed, and from their limited intelligence on her, was working to bring the Scions back home.
That night, he’d sat on the edge of his bed until it was nearly dawn, watching the candles slowly burn down, molten pools of wax dripping listlessly off their metal holders. Around him, the darkness pressed in, oppressive in this late hour and consuming everything in its wake. Behind him, his empty bed stretched wider than it ever had before. Outside, the world was colder and emptier for a loss that none seemed to feel as deeply as he.
She was gone.
The sky was awash with stars, twisting diamond dust between ink and indigo galaxies, and stretching so far in every direction that they swallowed the earth below. The warm weight of her, solid against his chest, was grounding and true as he stared upwards at the endless expanse, nestled in a pristine snowbank that was as warm as a summer breeze.
“And if someone comes looking?” He asked lowly into her hair, letting his lips drift languidly across the top of her head. The hillside sloped lazily beneath them, stretching wide in all directions, anonymous and distant in a way that the city walls never afforded them.
He felt her rare smile against his collarbone, rubbing her cheek comfortably against his bare skin as she pressed herself closer. “Let them try.”
The breeze was warm, made up of her perfume, her longing, her unshakeable faith in him, and it wrapped around them, setting warm, unmelting snowflakes dancing against their exposed skin. When she tilted her face up to him, he pressed his lips against her cheekbones to melt away the flakes that had settled there.
She slipped a little, and he shifted his grip, hauling her up that much closer, wrapping both arms around her waist. She turned in his arms, focused on the endless expanse of sky above them, starlight catching in the colour of her eyes. Lazily, he traced his fingertips across the bare expanse of her back, feeling out the curves of her hips, the notches of her spine.
“It’s like you could drown in it,” she said softly, fingertips stretching slightly towards the bottomless sky. “It goes on forever.”
As if in response, the hillside dipped further, and this time his years of battle-honed instincts needed to kick in, instantly tightening his hold tightly on her before she slipped from his arms entirely. The world tilted again, more substantially than it ever had before, and Aymeric felt her arms wind around his waist in turn, holding herself close as her breath caught, ever so softly, in her throat.
“I’ve got you,” he found himself murmuring into her hair, breathing her in, holding on tight. The world kept tilting, until he found himself looking downwards at her, their arms locked around each other as the only fragile defense against her falling down into that wide, gaping chasm of night sky that they now found below them. “I’ve got you.”
Her lips mouthed something, but he couldn’t make out the words. Around them, snow fell back up into the empty sky, leaving bare grasses and nodding snowdrops, each of them defying gravity to stretch towards the stars.
The warrior pressed her face into his neck, and Aymeric slid one hand up her back to cradle the back of her head, pressing reassuring kisses to her temple as he stared towards the starlit void. Unable to sustain so much strain, his muscles began to burn.
Against his will, his grip started to loosen.
Rumours were exchanged like coin in Ishgard, and Aymeric knew no small few of them involved him. They followed him across Coerthas and beyond, coming up in the strangest fragments of conversation. Snatches of sentences let him know that not only was he a blasphemer, a political schemer, and a murderer – slanders he’d worn for long enough that they no longer held sting – but that he was also guilty of betowing secret favour on this or that bright daughter of one of Ishgard’s houses.
It was a common rumour, spawned by hopeful mothers and ambitious fathers, and one that had only spiralled further out of control after the end of the Dragonsong War. It mattered little how much Aymeric disliked the crassness of it all; the brutal truth was, any match he chose to make was bound to become twisted for political means. His perpetual lack of interest in the topic only served to fan the flames higher, spurring teatime gossip of one hidden affair after another.
Each rumour, of course, often came alongside gentle ribbing in regards to his head being turned by the Warrior of Light. The open honesty of his face – his uncharacteristic inability to disguise how greatly she’d disarmed him – had caught him out on more than one occasion while she’d been living in Ishgard. To his mild surprise, however, while the jokes remained fairly frequent, they were also fleeting. None seemed to take his ‘infatuation’ very seriously.
He wasn’t offended. If anything, he agreed with them, with a clarity of thought that was impossible to describe. She was, after all, a fabled hero in her own right; the champion of Eorzea, the saviour of Ishgard. Her legend was of a calibre that no one had seen in thousands of years; mundane human emotions had no place in that story, as far as the public was concerned. As such, the Lord Commander’s blatant admiration of her was passed off as idle fancy; a sheltered lord like him was not the first nor the last to be struck dumb by the glow of her presence.
Nevermind that she was the very air he breathed. Nevermind that somehow, he was the one she’d chosen for her unguarded gaze and warm kisses.
Their secrecy, while unable to save them from any unfortunate rumours, benefited them both. It kept him safe, and he knew it; there was little that certain individuals wouldn’t do to press the advantage of any weak spot in the Warrior of Light’s armour. It was a fact that Aymeric loathed, that something so honest and pure as what he felt for her could be used as a weapon to hurt her.
Sometimes, his nightmares only consisted of that possibility, and he woke with phantom pains in the scars in his shoulder and in his side.
Secrecy, however, protected her as well. Her humanity, her true self that was still held steady beneath her name, her legend, and her Blessing – it was a gift, particularly as she faced harder and harder paths to follow.
He safeguarded it like a true sworn knight.
He protected her private self, storing up her startled laughter, kissing the corners of her rare smiles, and holding her together while she trembled in the darkest parts of the night, whispering her weighty, terrible choices into his skin. He held her secrets next to his heart like a flame, ready to warm her when she next came in from the cold, shoulders heavy and flayed open with a new array of scars.
That secrecy, however, protective as it may have been, came with a cost. Now, she was across the rift, and unable to send letters to him herself. Without her, no one thought to inform Aymeric of her wellbeing.
Slowly, the lack of news, and the worry, began to chip at his unwavering resolve to be patient.
Weeks rolled into months, with Ishgard locked in a season of violent late-year snowstorms, accompanied by a cold that bit down so harshly it nearly cracked the ancient stones of Foundation. News of the broiling civil unrest in Garlemald continued to fly in fast and frequent, consuming much of Aymeric’s time and considerable resources through the coming weeks. The fragile peace they’d won themselves sat on a knife’s edge, and it took careful strategic planning and communication across the city states in order to maintain the balance. The Lord Speaker’s days were full and exhausting, and always, always lacking in news of the whereabouts of the Warrior of Light, or whether she was successful in her endeavour to bring her comrades home.
Pressing his tangled thoughts down, Aymeric made his way through the snow and the darkness. He arrived at his empty home chilled to the bone, but his resolve had once more been tempered and hardened by the cold.
Perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow, there might be news.
She stood, impossibly, in the middle of the lake. Her bare feet were motionless as the gentle ripples of water washed over them, even as she stood on its formless surface, her loose hair tossed around her face by an unfelt breeze.
His own bare feet led him across the water towards her, never doubting that it would hold.
Never any doubt in his mind. Not when it came to her.
The water was unyielding beneath him as he walked, the current flowing gently beneath his feet. The ruins of a long-forgotten city lay murky at the bottom of the lake below, trying to split his attention with its familiar carvings and spires, to startle him into waking. He held steady, eyes on her face. The expression she held was unreadable, but her eyes never left his as he approached.
He called her name, just once. He knew that his lips moved, but no sound broke the heavy air, and the silence pressed insistently on his eardrums. She remained unmoving, watching him approach, like she’d been waiting for him.
He held out one hand to her, just out of reach.
She flinched.
Her face twisting in pain, she doubled over like she’d been stabbed, hands clutching at her skull like the gesture was the only thing preventing her head from splitting apart. Her lips parted in a scream, agony curling around the sharp set of her shoulders, but he heard nothing. Even the pounding of blood in his own ears had stopped.
He was lunging towards her even before she collapsed.
Instantly, he was submerged. The water gave way beneath him like it had never held his weight at all, and liquid filled his mouth, his throat, his lungs as he gasped for air, empty hands reaching futilely upwards towards her.
She fell to her hands and knees with a desperate choking sound, her kneecaps hitting the surface of the water with a single ringing sound like struck crystal. Beneath her, Aymeric fought desperately for the surface, heart pounding in a single-minded panic: get to her. If he could reach her, touch her, surely, that would stop all of this.
Instead, his hands reached hardened, crystallized water. It separated him from surfacing in a thick, impenetrable layer. His fingers raked and tore at it, his throat in silenced, drowned frustration.
Heavy, Aymberic’s limbs refused to obey, and he sank lower, panic pulsing in his veins. He was unable to move, unable to look away as she heaved, choking, desperately struggling to draw breath.
Propped up on one hand, her fingers dug uselessly into the solid water beneath her, directly above where his hand would have broken through the surface if he’d been successful. Her nails splintered against its unyielding surface, grasping desperately for purchase as she heaved, gagging. Her free hand clawed at her neck, scoring bloody marks down her throat, and Aymeric fought blindly against his own numbing limbs, furiously attempting to fight to get to her side.
Useless. He couldn’t even gather enough breath to call her name.
Violently, like her body couldn’t contain it anymore, she began to choke up a thick, gritty substance, her throat constricting around it like it was solidifying inside her. The liquid burned bright against the water where it spattered beneath her, sizzling in thick, gelatinous bubbles as it quickly thickened into solid plaster. Her whole body shuddering with the effort, she continued to choke up pure white tar, her eyes wide with a fear that Aymeric had never seen on her in life, and never wanted to see on her face again.
Blood, shining white and ethereal, had begun to drip slowly into the water around him, swirling around him like ink, seeping steadily from the hand she held herself up with. He realised, sick with fear, that above him, the water had fused around her hand, immobilising it to the surface with the unmoving smoothness of solid marble. Her veins bulged unnaturally against her skin, and Aymeric watched in horror as what could only be the marble itself, solid and sharp, forced its way into her skin through her palm, pushing its way up her arm through her veins.
Growing like vines, solid stone forced its way beneath her skin, seeking her pounding heart, while her skin fractured like fault lines around the ridges of her bursting veins, spilling more shining blood to drip down into the dark, unforgiving water.
Eventually, she stopped choking. Stopped moving entirely.
When she finally fell, the silence was deafening.
Below her, powerless, Aymeric sank into the dark, murky water of the lake. Around him, the drowned city closed in like a tomb.
Darkness settled on Ishgard like a shroud, one of the coldest storm seasons on recent record locking the city in a state of near-stasis. The populace were reluctant to leave their homes and feeble fires, and the churches had been converted into communal spaces where warmth and sustenance could be distributed to those most in need.
In that perpetual darkness, Aymeric found himself lying awake more and more often.
Something had twisted, somewhere. Where he’d once dreamed of her smile and her laughter, of the place beneath her jaw where he’d so often pressed his lips, he now only dreamed of the look in her eyes as she choked to death, just out of his reach.
The cold deepened further as the days wore on, twisting alongside Aymeric’s fear, whispering traitorously to him as he stared, awake, at the dark shadows of his empty bedchamber. Surely, his doubts breathed to him, his own imagination couldn’t possibly stretch far enough to make that terror behind her eyes as real as it was.
Something terrible has happened to her.
Pacing did him little good, but it at least quieted the frustration mounting in his chest, and the futility gnawing at the back of his mind. Questions stacked up in his mind, fighting for answers and coming up woefully short.
What good was a figurehead when wars were fought with covert schemes amassed from centuries of stacked power? What use was a politician’s mediation when innocents were being slaughtered in the name of a nation? What help could he provide, when the person his heart beat for was lost somewhere beyond the rift, where help wouldn’t reach her in time if she needed it?
Aymeric found himself standing deathly still in the middle of the room, chest heaving with laboured breaths like he’d sprinted across the hinterlands.
She was the last person in the world who needed saving.
It didn’t stop him from wanting to try.
Sometimes, he thought to himself, catching a glimpse of his own icy reflection in one of the room’s dark windows, being left behind in Ishgard felt like being buried alive.
He fell asleep that night stretched out on his back, one palm flat against the cold empty space in the bed next to him.
The echoing cathedral was no longer bathed in jewelled facets of light. Instead, it sat dim and silent, shrouded in bruised purples of a dying winter evening. Shadows stretched like grasping fingers from every crevice, draping languidly over empty pews and settling heavily on sharpened spires and staircases. Looming statues looked down with menacing disdain on Aymeric as he passed, every knight and saint cursing his bastardized existence with a disapproval he could feel rather than see.
Ahead of him, she was already on her knees before the altar, her back to him and her head bent low. Palms flat on the stone floor beneath her, her slender fingers flexed, fighting an invisible tension.
Her name barely passed his lips, but the sound carried to the cavernous ceiling nevertheless.
When she turned to face him, however, her expression held only relief. Whole and unharmed, her shoulders released a long-held tension as she stared at him, and while he couldn’t remember moving, she was in his arms nevertheless.
“You’re alright,” he found himself whispering against her temple, holding her tightly against him as she took slow, unsteady breaths against his throat. Reassurances poured out of him, as much for his sake as hers. “You’re alright.”
Pulling back just enough to look at her eyes, he brushed her hair reverently back away from her face, twisting the strands around his fingers and studying her expression like it could lead him towards an answer. Where she’d gone. What had happened to her.
When she would come home.
Instead of answering the wordless questions in his gaze, she surged forwards to press her mouth to his.
Kissing her like this was a hard, desperate thing. A shift happened almost immediately, where rather than searching for places to rest, their hands roamed frantic, seeking out where to grab, to cling, to pull closer, ever closer. Aymeric fit his hands around her hips and hauled her against him, swallowing the soft sounds she made and letting himself drown.
This, he thought, as she carded her hands through his hair, tilting her head for better access, was the dream he’d been chasing. This was what had been hidden beneath so many nightmares, this desperate, unending need to be near her, to consume and be consumed, the world tilting out of place as he mapped out the lines of her neck, the dip of her waist, the shape of her ribcage as he drew his hands up her sides.
Dimly, he became aware of the acrid taste in his mouth.
It was nearly ashen, and gritty like sand. The taste burned on his tongue, sudden and sharp, and his hands tightened on her in surprise as he hissed in pain. Rather than letting him draw away, she pushed the advantage, crowding closer, curling her fingers against his chest, her nails biting sharp crescent moons into his skin.
Her mouth shaped words against his lips and he gasped for air, trying to make sense of them. Her voice echoed through his mind, ragged and pleading, even as no sound escaped her throat.
“I’m sorry…”
She shaped her apologies against his mouth like a prayer, and he had no space to pull away when her molten tears fell against his cheeks, blinding white and burning. The smell of charred skin mingled with the sweet, cloying smell of incense that she breathed into him, carried on half-formed words that she choked on.
“I’m sorry…I can’t…I-”
The wretched smell of sizzling flesh filled his nostrils, hitting the back of his throat and making him gag, eyes wide as he tried to wrench away from her. He managed to fight backwards a few inches, tearing his mouth from hers. Her grip clung to him, her nails leaving raw, bloody scores across his exposed throat as he stared, his eyes fixated in horror on her own – or rather, what was left of them.
Her eyes were melting.
No, Aymeric thought wildly, his mind clawing desperately for logic within the nightmare. That wasn’t quite right. Her eyes were intact, fixed intently on his, brimming with tears that were so bright and shining that they nearly hurt to look at.
The colour of her eyes, meanwhile, was slowly leaking out of them. Dark palettes of colour that he’d once committed to precious memory now slid down her irises like molten rock. Slick and glistening, her eye colour pooled at her lower lashes and spilled onto her cheeks with a slow, threatening slide that left gently smoking trails where they burned her stiff, unforgiving skin.
When the colours were finally gone, her eyes were still focused solely on his, unblinking in a bright, pupilless gold that nearly seemed to glow.
Her name caught in his throat, sticking thick and cloying with that same strange substance that he’d watched her choke on a hundred times before. In jagged pieces, he became aware that her skin had hardened akin to solid marble, smooth and unblemished, locked frozen around him.
Trapping him in her arms.
Leaving him with no alternative but to watch as she turned.
The transformation was brief, but the agony it inflicted on her was mapped out in her agonized cries, her desperate attempt to choke out his name, twisted as she was in inhuman pain. Each snap of her bones rang in his ears like a shot, her limbs elongating beyond human recognition, with too many joints breaking into jagged pieces along her long, taloned fingers.
From the exact spot on her temples where he’d so often pressed his lips, twisting growths of bone and cartilage erupted, sluggishly bleeding gold around the edges where they forced out through her skin. They grew upwards like tree branches, crowning her like stag antlers and circling around her skull in a queen’s circlet. She screamed anew as its thorns pierced across her skin, rooting themselves into her skull and directly into her open, unblinking eyes. Gold spilled like thick, shining blood, running fractured rivers down her gaunt face and meeting the bright, spidery pattern of her veins, which shone unbearably bright through her smooth marble skin.
She was beautiful.
She was a horror.
Her hand was around his throat like lightning, nails piercing into his skin and through his windpipe as easily as through untouched snow. His lips were still warm from her kisses, and his fingertips still remembered the steady reassurance of her pulse beating against her slender throat, but his memories didn’t matter here.
She was gone. Shining and beautiful and all-consuming in her awesome power, she didn’t recognize him anymore.
Pain wasn’t in dying, Aymeric came to realize as the minutes ticked on. That sort of pain was to be expected, and was delivered upon; the acute agony of feeling his own red blood running warm and thick down his skin, clogging in his throat and dimming his vision.
True pain was different. That sort of piercing grief lay in the expression of satisfied joy lighting up his lover’s golden, thorn-pierced eyes as she looked down at him. Pain was the unadulterated hunger on her face as she sheathed her shining blade directly through his chest, letting the stale cathedral air gently caress his newly exposed ribcage.
Pain was the acute, undeniable knowledge that his suffering, his death, his moments of inescapable agony, merely served to slake her monstrous hunger. She consumed his fear, delighting in it even as she whispered feverish prayers in his name, her voice turned to gravel as her throat hardened to stone.
“I love you.”
I loved you…
Aymeric stopped sleeping.
It was ironic, in its way, he mused to himself humorlessly as he made his way towards the Congregation. The driving snow had given way to biting cold, with winds that whipped through every crack in stones and souls alike. He was forced to duck his head against it, chin tucked into his collar and hiding his face from the brutal onslaught, making his way steadily down the ice-slick stairs of the city. The rumours of his sleeplessness that had followed him for so long had finally come to fruition.
He failed to see how anyone thought he could be half as effective as they expected him to be on so little sleep.
He had a dark feeling that he was about to find out.
Sleeplessness or not, he couldn’t be allowed to slip, even for a moment. There was war brewing on the horizon once more, and there were too many innocent lives depending on him to even consider failure.
He wouldn’t admit that he was tired. Wouldn’t think about how there was only one person who’d ever asked him if this was even what he wanted.
And that now she was gone.
The days passed in a haze. A soft ringing in his ears followed him everywhere he went, exhaustion itching under his skin and dragging his limbs heavily down into every chair he sat in. Aymeric’s expression rapidly fell back to the sort of detached hollowness that he hadn’t felt since the worst days of the Dragonsong War, before the Scions had ever appeared. Before the Warrior of Light had walked like a beacon into his life, and set his set path entirely off course. Professionalism and distance was easy to maintain when all of his attention was focused on simply keeping track of conversations, an easy, protective mantle to don once more.
His state didn’t go unnoticed, but well-intended attempts to send him away to rest, no matter who they came from, were fruitless. Every time he closed his eyes, even for a moment, he saw her. Her, and the bright-gold blood pooling languidly from the corners of her mouth, sliding suggestively down her elongated throat. Nausea churned at him from exhaustion and fear, keeping him even further from sleep, too heartsick to even consider resting.
Nevertheless, he’d rather dwell on his sleeplessness, his exhaustion, rather than let his mind go anywhere near the cold, ringing fear that settled deep in his chest, creeping with spidery tendrils of frost around his heart.
She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be.
She couldn’t be.
“You promised,” he found himself murmuring thickly to himself one night in the darkness. His head was propped on his folded arms, finally succumbing to exhaustion where he sat at his desk, a single candle sputtering low near his elbow. The room was too large, too dark, and far, far too empty. It felt like he was suffocating. “You promised me…”
Exhaustion began to claim him, dragging him towards a void that he didn’t want to face, didn’t want to witness again and again, though he could never seem to change the result.
“You promised you’d come back to me…”
Somewhere in the bottomless darkness, there was a faint, soft glow.
Stumbling and uncharacteristically disoriented with exhaustion, Aymeric wandered towards it, for a lack of anywhere else to go. Everywhere was darkness; eventually, he would be pulled into his nightmares yet again. It was as inevitable as sleep, as waking, again and again, an endless cycle that was just one more thing he had no control over.
And still she never came back.
So he walked, and he blinked hazily at the rosy light as it drifted in and out of his vision, dimly wondering which flavour of horror his subconscious had in store for him this time.
Maybe this time he’d be able to die instead.
“Oh, my little tighearnas.” The voice was bright and disappointed, setting the movement of the tiny light fluttering in agitation. “Look at the state of you!”
A tiny creature busied itself around Aymeric’s shoulder, clicking their tongue and tutting in a way that was almost parental. It zipped back and forth around his head, too quick for him to get a good look, fretting and fussing with a string of curses as they went. Listening to their words, finding meaning in them, felt like coming out of a fog.
“I knew my beloved sapling could be heartless, but I didn’t realise she could be so secretive as well! All of our guesses, all of our wondering, and all this time, that closed-off mind of hers was hiding you! Of all things! Beastly, ghastly girl!”
Furrowing his brow in blurry concentration, Aymeric considered the pixie – for it could only be a pixie – hovering at his shoulder, their eyes glinting with pity and distress as they looked him over. They continued to click their tongue in disapproval, roaming around his head and shoulders, seeking out a physical mark or injury they could pinpoint.
“You haven’t been sleeping properly in a very long time, have you, little knight?” They finally demurred, tilting their head curiously as they examined him, wings fluttering frantically. “Terrible, selfish girl, my sapling is. We could have helped you long ago, had we known you were here!”
Before them, cutting through the unending darkness, a hazy, gentle circle of warm light formed. It carved an oval-shaped window not unlike a mirror, reflecting the interior of a tidy, well-finished room, illuminated by soft starlight. The pixie gestured towards it, pushing lightly at Aymeric’s shoulder with bright, sharp nails.
Drained, he allowed himself to be led. Whatever horror the room contained, he would stomach it and more. The longer this new dream endured, the more sleep he was getting. With even just a little extra rest, he could face the cold realities of the world once more.
“Look there, you see?” The pixie clasped their hands together, eyes shining as they stared into the hazy reflection, its contents coming into clearer focus. “Perfectly unharmed, and just as lovely as the day she arrived.”
Looking into the reflection, Aymeric’s senses snapped into focus as his heartbeat stuttered in his chest.
She was asleep. Curled onto her side in an achingly familiar pose, she lay in exhausted slumber in the unfamiliar room. Atop the blankets, as was her wont when she pushed herself to the point of collapse, her features were clearer, more real, than anything his dreamwashed memories had ever been able to conjure before. Aymeric took an unconscious step towards the image, his gaze sharpening on the details of her face and her form, seeking out any outward appearance of injury. The hard fist around his heart loosened somewhat when he found none.
She was safe.
She was alive.
“None the worse for wear,” came the small, bright voice at his shoulder. Aymeric didn’t turn, unable to tear his gaze away from the hero’s face, peaceful in sleep.
“Of course,” the pixie continued, tutting under their breath, “the state of that soul is something to keep an eye on, but! Don’t you worry, my little lordling. I’ll make sure she comes home to you, safe and sound.”
Aymeric flexed his fingers at his sides, just once. The urge to reach out and touch her was nearly all-consuming; to have her so close and to be unable to get to her was unbearable. He knew, however, with clear-eyed certainty, that if he attempted to reach her, he’d find the image before him to be little more than smoke passing over a mirror. A formless reflection, and further beyond his reach than he could possibly imagine.
She shifted in her sleep, brow furrowing with unknown dreams. Her hand moved to tuck more comfortably beneath her cheek, and for a moment, Aymeric’s mouth went dry.
At his shoulder, the pixie chuckled at the expression they found on his face. “Aye, that’s what we noticed too! Clever girl, she keeps it glamoured so no one can see, but that couldn’t fool us forever! No no no, we have magicks that you dear little mortals could only dream of!”
They shook their head, their grin sharp. “Only a matter of time till we noticed, yes indeed,” they singsonged lightly. “The glamour fades when she’s asleep, see?”
Aymeric nodded, slow, his gaze focused intently on the image before him, committing every detail to memory. There was a slow, immoveable burning in his chest that he was struggling to breathe around. She was far from home, far from help, farther still from her network of allies and the world that she knew.
But wherever she was, she was still wearing his ring.
“And now it’s time to wake up, sweet prince,” the pixie crooned gently at his elbow, starting to flutter lightly away from him.
Too soon. Aymeric’s consciousness recognized the cue, and he felt himself drifting from the dream; the more he tried to fight it, the more he seemed to drift, the unreality around him shifting and sliding back towards cool, thankless darkness. Unmoving, he kept his gaze on her face, determined to hold onto the image as long as possible.
“Give her back to me.” He didn’t think he’d spoken aloud. He wasn’t sure he needed to.
“Time to wake up.” The pixie’s voice dropped to a soft whisper, and Aymeric found himself fading as though to fall asleep, the world around him slipping away into emptiness.
He kept his gaze on her sleeping face until the last.
Dawn hadn’t quite broken over the mountain ridges of Coerthas, and watery winter sunlight weakly attempted to piece the thick layers of ice that had encased Ishgard’s spires and windows. It took Aymeric a none too small amount of effort to finally force one of his windows open, the fresh, clean mountain air wafting into the room immediately. The cold was a balm on his face, and from this vantage point in the city, he was granted a wide, unhindered view of the horizon. Below, the land seemed washed clean, blanketed in an unblemished layer of ice and snow. The air was unnatually calm, a breath of stillness after so many weeks of storms.
For a long moment, Aymeric stood at the window, letting the room grow colder as the sun slowly rose. Every breath he took was a shock against his lungs, and each one grew easier and easier, a tightness slowly releasing from his chest as he considered what he’d seen.
She was safe. She was alive.
Aymeric closed his eyes against the slowly strengthening sunlight, and breathed.
Around him, time passed uneventfully, and the room slowly brightened. Light traced softly over the hardened pools of wax surrounding dozens of burned-down candles, over papers half-crumpled and haphazardly strewn across nearly every surface. Evidence of endless sleepless nights, his futile attempts to stave off his insomnia and heartache.
Absorbed in his thoughts, Aymeric didn’t look away from the sunlit view when he heard the soft knock behind him, followed by the door creaking slowly open.
“Lord Comm…ah. Lord Speaker?” The voice was familiar, a green knight recently transferred from Dragonshead, often caught up in overt formalities that more seasoned knights had long done away with. “I…an urgent missive, my lord.”
He sounded nearly apologetic, but Aymeric didn’t turn. The growing sunlight was battling with the winter chill against his skin, and he faced it head-on, letting his vision blur in the brightness of it.
“There’s news, my lord. From Mor Dhona, said to be put directly in your hands.” The knight cleared his throat, clearly set uncertain by the commander’s distracted focus.
“From the Rising Stones. It’s the Scions.”