Archive of Our Own ^beta

At first, Lahabrea doesn’t notice her.

He’s in the corner of the Waking Sands, sifting through the memories of this new puppet of his and trying to carry on as if nothing had changed. It’s helpful that the Waking Sands is so busy at this time of hour. The antecedent is filing paperwork with that Lalafell receptionist while the Elezen scholar is buried nose deep in his books. There are a few merchants here and there carrying boxes of supplies in, and the more important members of the Scions are out on various missions. The Warrior of Light herself is too busy ensconced at a nearby table, doing Zodiark knows what with a pile of papers and crystalline chunks. Lahabrea lets out a long sigh and steeples his hands together as he tries to muddle through what this body knows.

But then, there’s a telltale trickle of fire-aspected aether that flows through the air and nudges at the edge of his senses. In spite of the mortal confines of his new body, Lahabrea is still one of the ancients, and the sensation of fire is impossible to ignore. He lifts his head up, searching for the source, and finds the Warrior.

The Warrior stretches her hands out to tenderly coax aether out of the air, and she weaves them into a familiar shape. A jaw comes first, carved out of fire and hardened into bone, and then comes the spine, curling outward until it forms a scaled tail. Muscles knot themselves along the lattice of aether, and then, they flow down to form limbs. Fire keratinizes into claws, and then, the new thing flexes before letting out a soft snort of smoke.

Lahabrea’s breath catches in his mortal throat at the sight of it. It is Ifrita.

Without the help of a concept matrix, the creation is small and frail, a fragment of what the original used to be, but it is still a thing of beauty. Whereas the Amalj’aa sought to create violence incarnate within the sands of their homeland, this version of Ifrita is made with care. Each scale and horn and tooth and claw are formed from small threads, wrapped around spindles of aether and set into place with the help of crystal and mythril. The sight of it reminds him of what he used to be in Amaurot. Ifrita was a beauty, a labor of love that he had poured countless days and nights into. He was a young, burgeoning scholar then, itching to get out of his stagnant classes and lectures and occupying his idle hands with a phantom borne out of his waking dreams. But Ifrita was enough to gain the attention of the previous Lahabrea, who inducted him into his Words and later, into the seat itself.

He remembers using Ifrita again when he ascended to the seat of Lahabrea proper. It was meant to be part of an instructive lecture in the Akadaemia for beginner students: a lesson on productively utilizing the volatile powers of fire and lightning aspected aether in creation. Most of their attempts at utilizing Ifrita faltered, forming half-made things of leather and scale before subsuming themselves in a combustive burst of smoke. Lahabrea remembers summoning the largest one, creating an Ifrita so large it could reach up and touch the ceiling if it wanted to. An instructive demonstration that leaned more towards performative art, straining at the protective wards welded into the walls — something that Pashtarot scolded him heavily for. But Lahabrea remembers not Pashtarot’s remonstrations but rather, the bright, shining eyes of his students as they gazed at Ifrita and dared to dream of creating even better things.

“Ah, Thancred,” she says, jolting Lahabrea out of his nostalgia. He forces himself to remember himself not as an Ascian, but rather, whatever these Scions knew this body as. The Warrior tilts her head and says, “I apologize, I should’ve asked if you were alright with me conducting an experiment here. You were so quiet, I didn’t notice you there.”

“No worries,” Lahabrea says, tongue stiff with disuse. His gaze strays over to Ifrita again and the Warrior tracks his gaze easily. She carefully turns the creation around with a rotation of her wrist, fluid and practiced, and shows him the entirety of it.

“Ifrit,” she says. “Modeled after the primal, albeit without the ability to temper.” She runs a finger down its leathery back and muses, “Y’mhitra tells me that the Allagans used to transform stolen essences from primals and create egis. A fascinating endeavor, but without records of the process, I did not wish to blindly attempt a summoning and temper us all. So, I am trying to build an Ifrit of my own using aetheric geometry as my base.”

With her other hand, she snaps and summons forth a brilliant blue fox-like creature with a bushy tail and dewdrop eyes. “After all, if arcanists can summon Carbuncles from geometric patterns enchanted within grimoires, then the same principle must apply to an Ifrit,” she continues. “But this Ifrit is not fit for combat. Not yet, at least.”

Lahabrea cannot help himself. Before he was an Ascian, before Hydaelyn or Lord Zodiark, even before he was the Speaker of the Convocation, he was a creator. He drags his chair over to where the Warrior sits and inspects the creation closely. Yes, there is a framework holding Ifrita together, but it does not utilize the same methods of aetheric conversion that the Amaurotines used. Instead, the geometry is designed to channel aether and only that. The most ideal way to summon Ifrita from sundered hands would be to use crystals, but again, the few crystals scattered across the Warrior’s books do not yield enough energy to power the creation. If the Warrior intends to take this creation into combat, then she does not have the luxury of carting buckets of crystals with her. No, there must needs be a way to translate her paltry stores of aether into something functional.

“Have you thought about altering the way you aspect the aether?” he asks. Lahabrea slides his hands across the table to cup the creation. Slowly, ever so slowly, he works in his own energy until he reaches the bare bones of the thing. “The shape you have drawn out suits arcanima since Carbuncle is designed to take in latent aether and convert it after its summoning. You intend to summon Ifrita, which is aspected to fire before the summoning. Thus, you must change the foundation itself.”

“Interesting,” the Warrior says. She dismisses the creation with a wave of her hand and reaches for graphite to sketch out a few sigils. “But is that efficient in terms of energy? To summon multiple egis, one would require multiple constructions of arcanima. I’d imagine a single summoner would be limited to one or two, perhaps even three if they decide to be ambitious.”

“There is a reason why the beast tribes require such vast amounts of crystals,” Lahabrea points out.

The Warrior grins impishly. “Point taken.”

She peers over her designs and settles on one, re-inscribing it with enchanted mythril ink. The lines are bold and dark, unspooling themselves from her pen with a jewel-like sheen. There are so many possibilities hidden within that ink, and Lahabrea watches closely as the Warrior guides them into the shape they need to be. Then, she resumes her work, dipping her fingers into the pool of aether coalescing over the sigil and swirling it into small, fire-aspected eddies. Ifrita forms again, but this time, there is weight to its bones and when it breathes out, there is a solid flame there instead of mere smoke.

“Not bad,” Lahabrea concedes.

The Warrior looks up from Ifrita and laughs, “An excellent contribution. Sometimes, I forget that you’re part of the Circle of Knowing. Not that you’re any less intelligent than Urianger or Y’shtola, mind you, but given your chronic skirt-chasing… Well, you have my thanks, Thancred.”

Something sour rears up in the back of Lahabrea’s mind, flailing and fighting to wrest control over the reins, so to speak, but he forces it down viciously. This flesh and blood is his now, for however long he needs it. Lahabrea pastes a smile on his face, and the body obeys, following the habit that it has kept for so many years. He searches for something to tell her and snatches up a spare sliver of memory to use as he says, “Sharlayan forces you to learn, whether you like it or not.”

“I think I would enjoy it there,” she says. “Something about working and learning with like-minded folk, all for the sake of bettering the star, sounds nice. Peaceful, even.”

 It takes all of Lahabrea’s energy to not flinch. It was nice, he wants to scream. It was peaceful. Amaurot was everything that he had ever wanted, the free space to explore and dream and create with wild, reckless abandon. He did not have to go through the rigmarole of finding another body to inhabit nor did he have to endure the fumbling and whining of the feeble sundered left to populate their broken star. It is the exact reason why he throws himself into his work, why he whittles away his soul piece by piece with every mortal body he inhabits, why he now embraces the insanity that dogged his heels for the past twelve thousand years. He reaches out to touch Ifrita, diminished as it is, and yearns for a past that this sundered minion of Hydaelyn cannot even dare to know.

Yet, he still can’t help but ask, “What would you do there? What would you do if you had boundless aether to use and all the time in the world to learn?”

The Warrior drums her fingers against the table as she considers his question. The sound is soft, a mere brush of her fingertips on the hewn wood, and Lahabrea counts the staccato beats of it as he waits. At first, she offers him a sardonic smile. “I suppose I could make a bigger Ifrit,” she says, rotating her creation around again with an inspecting eye. But then, she murmurs, “Greater scaffolds of arcanima, for one, would unlock so many things. Familiars are largely constrained in stature and ability by the mage’s store of aether and the available material at their disposal, but with boundless aether, I wouldn’t be limited to just a Carbuncle or Ifrit. I could dream of anything I wanted to create and bring it forth with a single sigil, a single shape.”

“Yes,” Lahabrea breathes out. “You could.”

He wonders who this Warrior would have been in the Amaurot of old. Perhaps she would’ve been an aspiring scholar in Akadaemia Anyder, developing new concepts and designing new creation matrices for her peers to examine and critique. Perhaps she would’ve done well in Elpis, monitoring and testing concepts before sending them out to the world. Her creativity would have been rewarded well, and her energy could have gone towards something infinitely more productive than aiding that fell creature of Light calling itself Hydaelyn.

But then, the Warrior splays her fingers out over her newest sigil, smudging ink outside of its borders and staining her fingers navy blue. “But even with boundless aether, my own creativity would soon exhaust itself and I would be left with infinite time to my own devices,” she confesses. “No, that would not satisfy me for long. Why waste time thinking about impossible things when I could be traveling the world and seeing what wonders already exist for me to see? Why bury myself within books and theoretical subject matter when I could be meeting new people in the world who think so differently than I do?”

Ah. Not Elpis and not Akadaemia Anyder then. Perhaps the Warrior would have served well as a Word of Azem. Lahabrea has not thought about the Fourteenth in what feels like forever, which is infinitely long considering his immortal life and his adamant soul. Azem, the counselor of the people scattered across their star and the lone dissenter among the Convocation who ultimately turned her back on them all. Lahabrea is no Emet-Selch, but still, the thought of Azem leaves a bitter taste on his tongue. Any reminder of Azem makes all of them bitter, save for Elidibus who Lahabrea doubts even remembers who Azem is. Yes, this Warrior of Light would’ve done well in the office of the Traveler.

He rallies his composure together as he inclines his head and says, “Perhaps you would’ve enjoyed being one of Sharlayan’s gleaners more than its scholars. Either way, it was merely a hypothetical.”

“Hypothetical it may be, but it still made me think,” the Warrior says warmly. “I appreciate your insights, Thancred. I’ll use them well.”

Lahabrea stands up and turns his back to the Warrior, offering only a mere flap of his hand in lieu of a goodbye. His skin itches badly as his soul tugs at the mortal sinews and tendons of this body, seeking to return to the aether-rich space between the shards. But duty demands that he stay here and see another machination out to its end. He is the Convocation’s Speaker, he holds the seat of Lahabrea, and as one out of three Unsundered, he must follow through for the sake of the star and his people.

But still, he cannot help but think about Ifrita, of the boundless threads of possibility set in the spindle of its being, of the creation that brought him his first accolades and the attention of the Convocation. In the silence of this new body, Lahabrea mourns.