((This thread takes place immediately following the Visit of the Incorrigible Dodo and significantly prior to the current RP timeline. It'll catch up to it over several posts, though.))
D'hein Tia was an exemplary member of the Dodo tribe in Ul'dah, a man of lustrous golden man and perfectly trimmed tail whose red robes shimmered with golden finery and immaculately cut gems. He often walked into things in the street, but did so proudly, even though he failed to notice his nosebleed after that wall sort of reached out and grabbed him. It was dark, and yellow lamplight is somewhat less effective than white, so onlookers should not hold it against him. D'hein Tia presented himself at the D-tribes humble compound, a set of lofty towers adorned in exquisite tapestry and rare foreign plants preserved in the hot Ul'dahn air by magic. It demonstrated its humiliated by having only one fountain, crafted decades hence by the finest artisans the Syndicate had ever possessed, instead of a handful of smaller fountains. More prideful communes would have at least five or so fountains, he was sure.
As it was night, D'hein was granted the luxury of solitude. Except for the dim lights and trickling fountains, all was dark slumber, except for the high tower somnus den where the Nunhs held their horrid soirees on a near nightly basis. D'hein tia paused in the courtyard, turning his green eyes up to the lit balconies and listening for the groans of unsatisfied women. he didn't hear any, of course, but he heard how the women talked. The Nunhs were secretly homosexuals, they said, and D'hein had confirmed this for at least one while he was seducing their women.
Which is why he only came home at night. A certain D'themia Nunh was still waiting for an excuse to kill D'hein Tia.
Halfway up one of the towers and across a bridge so thin it would make a Lominsan's knees shake, D'hein Tia pushed open a door and walked into a dark apartment. "D'ahl? D'ahl, are you decent?" It occured to him belatedly one should ask such questions before entering an apartment, and he was about to turn around when his thoughts were interrupted by a table that rudely struck his knee and toppled with a clatter of metal, glass and wood.
There was no pain. D'hein looked down and noticed a tear in his robe from the tables sharp edge, and stuck his finger in the hole with a frustrated expression. "Twelve-damned..."
"What! Who is-?" A woman ran around the corner in a thin nightrobe, a white and nearly translucent thing that billowed out from her form like woven spiderweb. She was perfectly proportioned, from her thin shoulders to the extra weight in her hips, and she was... familiar.
D'hein looked from her hips to her face and frowned in confusion. "Antimony?"
"What?" The woman took the glasses from her nose, gray-brown hair bundled up and hanging in braids below her ears. She sounded strangely excited, though her volume was a cautious whisper, "What's an Antimony? Is it a new kind of legal fee?"
D'hein's own voice did not respect the time of evening. "Ah, no. You're not... I mistook you for someone else."
"Ah, that's fancy," the woman pulled her robe tighter about her body, a show of modesty that had the accidental effect of making her shape more easily distinguished. "Being mistaken for someone else in my own home. Only you would make such a mistake, D'hein Tia."
He averted his eyes from the image. "Apologies, D'ahl. I can only assume you've been taking advice on your appearance from D'aijeen."
"Instruction, more like, at the pain of discipline if I don't comply!" She said this with humor and pride, her smile flickering in the moonlight that careened from one mirror to the next on walls that appeared drenched with sideways puddles. "The glasses are for reading, but the hair the hairstyle and hint of gray is all according to D'aijeen's very specific designs."
No matter where D'hein looked, he could see D'ahl in the mirrors. Even when he looked down at the floor, the mirrored shards of the glass-top table he'd broken reflected hints of of soft skin in sheer silk. D'ahl had never distressed him so, and in fact he had often hoped to catch such undefended glimpses of skin on her pristine body. Except D'ahl had suddenly become a doppleganger of D'aijeen's mother. It was strange that he'd never caught the resemblance before, but it was so exaggerated and accurate now that in the shadows of D'ahl's shimmering apartment D'hein could tell no difference between D'ahl and the woman D'hein had earned so much ire from.
D'hein took a steadying breath and inquired, "How long has she been-?"
"Years! It's a secret," at least there was the comfort that D'ahl's voice and manner of speaking was far removed from the woman she so resembled. "Which is the crux of my carelessness, D'hein Tia. This is a secret intimacy between D'aijeen and I, which you must not let her know that I revealed."
"Intimate," D'hein repeated, eyeing the mirrors, which were filled with D'ahl's body. "D'aijeen is here now?"
"Uhm. Yes, but..." The woman shifted in an uncharacteristic fashion, hands knotting in the folds of her robe and green eyes skirting towards the mirrors. Like D'hein, she would now discover that this apartment precluded all comfort from aversion. Her subtle attempt to look away was made obvious when she found D'hein's gaze waiting for her in the mirrors, and he saw the concern.
"But what?"
"She's begun a new habit of sleep-walking. I've never seen its like, except for the handful of times I've seen it in recent times."
"Recent times?"
"The past moon, perhaps," she pondered, nodding, "The first of the episodes was on the twenty-fifth day of the last moon. There have been five such episodes, and the seem to have triggers. I'm keeping track of circumstances to try and diagnose them."
"If she's been ill you should have told me!" D'hein bit, his ears laying back and his eyes squinting into the shadows. "You of all people should know that she-" He bit off his frustration when he realized that it was misplaced. D'ahl still looked like Antimony, a woman who had shown no openness to the possibility of her childrens' lives. That Antimony thought her children were dead was no excuse. D'hein, every bit D'aijeen's adoptive father, still found himself angry with Antimony.
It was unreasonable, and further unreasonable to let that anger slip against D'ahl. Particularly because there was no way D'ahl could know.
"Apologies," D'hein implored. "D'aijeen has long suffered from sleep-related abnormalities."
D'ahl nodded in patience, a gesture D'hein wished he had seen more often from the woman D'ahl resembled. "Perhaps you will recognize what she is experiencing, then. Come with me, I'll show you."
With that, D'ahl spun away to walked into her shadowed apartment, brown-blond tail swing behind her and throwing the robe away from her legs seductively. D'hein would not have looked were he not forced to. He may be perhaps a lecherous man to the women of his own tribe, but he did not wish to disrespect Antimony by objectifying her double. The thought was bizarre, and yet not as bizarre as the thought of D'aijeen doing so, and everything that implied. These ponderings disoriented D'hein and left him feeling as though he were trudging through water, reinforced by the shimmering of a hundred decorative mirrors on the walls of D'ahl's apartment. He knew the woman well enough to know that it was designed to specifically confuse, the mirrors interspersed with windows that were designed identically, causing one to question the difference between reflection and transparency.
By the time he arrived at the sitting room, his eyes no longer believed there was such a thing as windows. He looked out the massive windows that ran the towers outer wall and perceived them as mirrors, confusing his balance enough that he had to pause and breath. Inexplicable night wind blew in from opened windows concealed among the mirrors to his sides, soft moonlight reflected a thousand times. Glass wind chimes clicked like settling ice and through darting fragments of light over him, over the world. The view of Thanalan was reflected behind, above, below him. He felt like the floor around him were tumbling, but that he was stuck to it.
D'ahl watched him with a smile, patient with his discomfort. She enjoyed it. It continued for a long moment before D'ahl took a black tapestry -- a tribal pattern leftover from his tribes origins in the stony steppes west of Ul'dah -- and through it over what looked like a pane of glass in the room. But it had not been glass; it had been a mirror. And this simple movement stabilized the room in a moment. The mirrors and windows seemed to switch places in a sudden tumble, and only the floor beneath D'hein remained still. What he had thought were windows were in fact large mirrors, suddenly obvious, and there was now an open view of Ul'dah to his right through a small pair of windows -- in fact the only two in the room -- which he had not noticed before.
He heard humming in the suddenly static room. A large number of sofas and tables adorned it, shelves stacked high with glass figures that had been invisible moments before. He had also somehow failed to notice D'aijeen, who stood directly in front of one of the windows, staring tansfixed. His adoptive daughter, her skin the color of mud, her hair and tail a mossy green, was being attended to by D'ahl. The double-image of her mother, perhaps a few years younger, draped a silk night-robe over D'aijeen's otherwise naked body, the image bizarre. D'hein could almost picture D'aijeen being cared for by her mother, Antimony, out in the tribal wastes of the Sagolii.
The image took on a twisted air when D'ahl leaned forward to kiss D'aijeen's lips, and the man turned his gaze aside. The now-tamed mirrors in the room permitted the gesture, and he let himself feel the shivering ache of distress in his ribs.
The humming continued. Melodic, high in pitch, quieter than the wind. D'hein lifted his gaze back to where D'aijeen stood unmoved, eyes looking at the window as if she could see through D'ahl's body and watch the moon. For a moment, D'ahl met D'hein's gaze, and then she announced to him, "D'aijeen is asleep. It's distressingly adorable, isn't it? She does not wake from this spells until she is rested."
D'hein blinked at this, bundled up his resolve, and moved over towards the the women. He settled himself next to D'aijeen looking down at her face. The girl's blue eyes did not seem asleep. They wore a sad sort of wonder, and her lips moved. The humming was something exhaled from her throat, a slow and sad music. In her fingers, one of the glass figures -- a kind of drake, perhaps -- was being turned over and over between bother of her palms. Her digits moved over it strangely. She was feeling it, as though it were something unusual.
"What is she humming?"
"I don't recognize it," D'ahl answered, placing her face very close to D'aijeen's once more. "I've been listening. It's pretty. But I don't know the tune."
He turned to look out the window, "Is she looking at anything specific."
"Just clouds." D'ahl waited a moment before expounding, "She doesn't always look at the sky. She just stares at things in these episodes. There's no similarity between one thing and the next."
D'hein exhaled a sigh and brushed a lock of D'aijeen's hair behind her ear. "She's just sleep-walking, D'ahl." he turned his gaze on the woman, peering through his brown-blonde her to take her green eyes with his own green eyes. "I think we need to have a talk about your relationship with my daughter."
The woman looked D'aijeen over, was silent for a moment, and then smiled repulsively while she swooped forward, laying her cheek against D'aijeen's forehead and wrapping her arms around the the girl's shoulders. She eyed D'hein with an amused but unmistakable glare. "Your 'daughter' would disagree, as do I, D'hein Tia. And it is not why you came here tonight, is it?"
The ache in his chest resonated as he watched, and he tried to give it a precise identity. D'ahl was not a bad person. She was, in fact, one of D'hein's most trusted allies inside the tribe. And a good match for his daughter, normally. When D'hein had first found out about the intimacy in their relationship, he'd been glad, in fact. Why should such a simple thing as her hair change all of that? Because D'aijeen had requested it? It was not an unattractive hair style.
"You've become distracted, D'hein."
"Apologies." He shook his head slowly. "You're right, in fact, that I did not come here for this. Not that I would normally prescribe any reason to come to your home at night except I could not sleep but to see you." Even in his disturbance, the instinctive flirtation found his voice. Whether D'ahl was D'ahl or Antimony, she was still beautiful. "It's simply that we leave tomorrow for Ala Mhigo, you and I, so I wished to confer prior."
"Everything's in order," D'ahl said. "Poor D'aijeen will miss me, though, so I was letting her stay over."
"She'll have to go and stay with her sister and Drybone while we're gone. We don't want D'themia causing another incident if he decides he can force her to mate while we aren't around."
"D'aijeen and I have discussed this," D'ahl said, squeezing D'aijeen about the shoulders. The girl continued to hum and stare out the window. "She was frustrated but accepting. She is so enthralled by her sister I'm almost jealous."
"As am I," D'hein admitted, and shrugged. "There are some details I'd like to go over, but..."
D'ahl nodded to him, "But tonight I am dedicating time to D'aijeen. These spells only last an hour or two and then she goes back to bed. When she does, I intend to rouse her to discuss this." She fixed the Tia with a frown, "I do not believe this is mere sleepwalking."
"What does D'aijeen think?"
"That is personal," D'ahl's green eyes slipped closed, her voice turning boastful, "D'aijeen and I keep many confidences. Now, D'hein Tia, please leave. It is improper for a Tia to be in a lady's room after dark, and we would all be inconvenienced if you were to find yourself queued for punishment again."
He huffed, "Fair enough," and turned from the woman. As he did so, Dahl ceased giving him her attention, turning it instead to D'aijeen. As D'hein Tia walked away, he watched in the mirrors as D'ahl stared into the eyes of the supposed-orphan whom he had adopted. Years after taking her in, he had met her mother. Perhaps if he had not, he would not have realized the strangeness of D'aijeen's relationship with D'ahl. He made it all the way to the door of the apartment, catching steadily smaller glimpses of the girl and her confidant, glimpses of scandalous skin and strange closeness. He tried not linger too long on these things, choosing instead to assume that they were artifacts of assumptions on his part. Antimony was a lovely woman, so why shouldn't D'ahl resemble her? He had heard women were often attracted to men who looked like their fathers, so perhaps this was a similar thing.
"Oh, Aijee, why are you crying?"
D'hein stopped with his hand on the doorknob, glancing to an adjacent mirror. Through a series of a dozen fake windows, D'hein could see the sitting room, D'ahl staring into his daughter's eyes.
"Why are you sad?" D'ahl dabbed at D'aijeen's face with the sleeve of her robe. Her voice suddenly sounded very much like Antimony's voice. "My little Aijee. Don't be sad. I'm right here. Mom's here."
It was not until they had been out of Ul'dah for a week that D'hein finally found it in himself to say, "You do know how strange it is, right?"
D'ahl gave him a sideways look, her sweat-dappled face no longer resembling Antimony in any way. Her hair down, her demeanor different, and after a week of riding a chocobo all day through hot sun and cold night, the differences stood out. Her clothes were thick leather, her hair not only unbraided but messy and several shards lighter, younger. Antimony was a soft, studious woman, and D'ahl was decorated in muscles and scars. Her facial markings were similar, but different.
And her voice was smooth and deceptive like a politicians, bearing no hesitance whatsoever when she feigned ignorance. "What is strange, D'hein Tia? The way you wound yourself to the point of bleeding but cannot be bother to notice?"
"Yes. That is a strange and fascinating thing which I do." He stared forward at the blue horizon, smiling to himself of his very masculine and impressive tolerance for pain, that was not in any way the result of a damaged nervous system as some people said. They would be arriving in Ala Mhigo the next day, and he found all of these days of riding pleasant. He shook himself, "Dammit, D'ahl! No! You're trying to confuse me!"
"It is very easy."
"D'aijeen has you playing the part of her mother! And you're in it." He point. "She coached you on how to talk like her, right?"
"Yes," D'ahl answered, as though it were something to be proud of. "D'aijeen designed all of it. My hair, my voice, told me to use less complicated phrasing, and such as that."
"And that doesn't strike you as unusual?"
"Oh, at first I was completely..." D'ahl pondered for a moment, swaying back and forth with the movement of her chocobo. The wind caught her long, straight hair and blew it against her face, where it stuck in her sweat. Her pale skin had begun to turn red with sunburn days back. In fact, she hardly seemed feminine at all, much less to resemble Antimony in any way, except perhaps vaguely in the structure of her face, the color of her eyes? "At first it seemed nothing more than an unsettling and honestly revolting perversion."
D'hein was torn between the want to agree with D'ahl vehemently and the want to defend his daughter from some sort of insult.
"After a time," D'ahl said, "I perceived it as cute, and then as very sad. But it makes sense. I appear and speak as though I am her mother, and tell her that I love her, and am proud of her, and that I admire and cherish her every whim. And she cries sometimes, and I tell her that it is alright because I will always be there for her."
The Tia's jaw moved strangely, trying to imagine what such interactions must look like, but he could not imagine D'aijeen requesting such things be spoken to her, nor such words being honestly delivered in D'ahl's voice. But it would not be D'ahl's voice, would it? It would be D'ahl imitating Antimony's voice.
"D'hein!"
"What?" He snapped his gaze up, and then his chocobo suddenly bellowed a shrill, dramatic cry of warning and jerked to the side. The bird failed to avoid the mole under foot and toppled, sending D'hein rolling to earth. The mole shot off in one direction and his chocobo ran in panicked circles as the Tia kicked his way out of a stand of succulents, grunting in protest. "Dammit D'ahl!"
"Azeyma have mercy!" he heard the woman call. "Stop writhing! You'll only make it worse!"
"I'm fine!" He said, and pitched himself to his feet, finding himself unsteadied by the lingering presence of fleshy, green vessels on his body. He flexed his arm, feeling his robe and skin shift oddly, and paused with a subtle, "Oh," when he realized that several cactuses were joined to his flesh by a few hundred cactus needles. Many in his face. It didn't hurt.
"What is wrong with you!?" D'ahl shouted, jumping from her chocobo to run to his aid.
He actually chuckled, "I think it might be about time for me to admit that I might have nerve damage," he said. Then he turned his gaze to D'ahl and demanded, "Listen! Are you or are you not knowingly contributing to my daughter's incestuous perversions?"
"It's not sexual," D'ahl said, pulling on thick gloves and reaching out to take hold of the succulents. "Well, it is, because she and I are, and it's... but it's not just..."
"Don't cloud the issue, D'ahl!" He grunted when she ripped one of the succulents from his arm. It still didn't hurt.
"Be quiet, Tia! Oh, I wish I could hurt you." She shook a cactus in his face, "Your daughter is very sad and I'm doing what I can to comfort her. I have absolutely no desire to hear your thoughts on the matter. Now cease speaking of it or I'll shove this in your mouth and you'll never taste anything but cactus soup again!"
"But she hates her mother!" D'hein protested. "It doesn't make sense. And what if her mother turned up? Imagine how strange it would be!"
"I will not warn you again, D'hein Tia!" She pulled another cactus off his body. "Actually, while I have power over you, I demand you tell me why we're going to Ala Mhigo! Are we to aid the resistance?"
"No," D'hein answered. "I'm going to try to contact my superiors in the Garlean Empire."
D'ahl froze. "What."
D'hein Tia was an exemplary member of the Dodo tribe in Ul'dah, a man of lustrous golden man and perfectly trimmed tail whose red robes shimmered with golden finery and immaculately cut gems. He often walked into things in the street, but did so proudly, even though he failed to notice his nosebleed after that wall sort of reached out and grabbed him. It was dark, and yellow lamplight is somewhat less effective than white, so onlookers should not hold it against him. D'hein Tia presented himself at the D-tribes humble compound, a set of lofty towers adorned in exquisite tapestry and rare foreign plants preserved in the hot Ul'dahn air by magic. It demonstrated its humiliated by having only one fountain, crafted decades hence by the finest artisans the Syndicate had ever possessed, instead of a handful of smaller fountains. More prideful communes would have at least five or so fountains, he was sure.
As it was night, D'hein was granted the luxury of solitude. Except for the dim lights and trickling fountains, all was dark slumber, except for the high tower somnus den where the Nunhs held their horrid soirees on a near nightly basis. D'hein tia paused in the courtyard, turning his green eyes up to the lit balconies and listening for the groans of unsatisfied women. he didn't hear any, of course, but he heard how the women talked. The Nunhs were secretly homosexuals, they said, and D'hein had confirmed this for at least one while he was seducing their women.
Which is why he only came home at night. A certain D'themia Nunh was still waiting for an excuse to kill D'hein Tia.
Halfway up one of the towers and across a bridge so thin it would make a Lominsan's knees shake, D'hein Tia pushed open a door and walked into a dark apartment. "D'ahl? D'ahl, are you decent?" It occured to him belatedly one should ask such questions before entering an apartment, and he was about to turn around when his thoughts were interrupted by a table that rudely struck his knee and toppled with a clatter of metal, glass and wood.
There was no pain. D'hein looked down and noticed a tear in his robe from the tables sharp edge, and stuck his finger in the hole with a frustrated expression. "Twelve-damned..."
"What! Who is-?" A woman ran around the corner in a thin nightrobe, a white and nearly translucent thing that billowed out from her form like woven spiderweb. She was perfectly proportioned, from her thin shoulders to the extra weight in her hips, and she was... familiar.
D'hein looked from her hips to her face and frowned in confusion. "Antimony?"
"What?" The woman took the glasses from her nose, gray-brown hair bundled up and hanging in braids below her ears. She sounded strangely excited, though her volume was a cautious whisper, "What's an Antimony? Is it a new kind of legal fee?"
D'hein's own voice did not respect the time of evening. "Ah, no. You're not... I mistook you for someone else."
"Ah, that's fancy," the woman pulled her robe tighter about her body, a show of modesty that had the accidental effect of making her shape more easily distinguished. "Being mistaken for someone else in my own home. Only you would make such a mistake, D'hein Tia."
He averted his eyes from the image. "Apologies, D'ahl. I can only assume you've been taking advice on your appearance from D'aijeen."
"Instruction, more like, at the pain of discipline if I don't comply!" She said this with humor and pride, her smile flickering in the moonlight that careened from one mirror to the next on walls that appeared drenched with sideways puddles. "The glasses are for reading, but the hair the hairstyle and hint of gray is all according to D'aijeen's very specific designs."
No matter where D'hein looked, he could see D'ahl in the mirrors. Even when he looked down at the floor, the mirrored shards of the glass-top table he'd broken reflected hints of of soft skin in sheer silk. D'ahl had never distressed him so, and in fact he had often hoped to catch such undefended glimpses of skin on her pristine body. Except D'ahl had suddenly become a doppleganger of D'aijeen's mother. It was strange that he'd never caught the resemblance before, but it was so exaggerated and accurate now that in the shadows of D'ahl's shimmering apartment D'hein could tell no difference between D'ahl and the woman D'hein had earned so much ire from.
D'hein took a steadying breath and inquired, "How long has she been-?"
"Years! It's a secret," at least there was the comfort that D'ahl's voice and manner of speaking was far removed from the woman she so resembled. "Which is the crux of my carelessness, D'hein Tia. This is a secret intimacy between D'aijeen and I, which you must not let her know that I revealed."
"Intimate," D'hein repeated, eyeing the mirrors, which were filled with D'ahl's body. "D'aijeen is here now?"
"Uhm. Yes, but..." The woman shifted in an uncharacteristic fashion, hands knotting in the folds of her robe and green eyes skirting towards the mirrors. Like D'hein, she would now discover that this apartment precluded all comfort from aversion. Her subtle attempt to look away was made obvious when she found D'hein's gaze waiting for her in the mirrors, and he saw the concern.
"But what?"
"She's begun a new habit of sleep-walking. I've never seen its like, except for the handful of times I've seen it in recent times."
"Recent times?"
"The past moon, perhaps," she pondered, nodding, "The first of the episodes was on the twenty-fifth day of the last moon. There have been five such episodes, and the seem to have triggers. I'm keeping track of circumstances to try and diagnose them."
"If she's been ill you should have told me!" D'hein bit, his ears laying back and his eyes squinting into the shadows. "You of all people should know that she-" He bit off his frustration when he realized that it was misplaced. D'ahl still looked like Antimony, a woman who had shown no openness to the possibility of her childrens' lives. That Antimony thought her children were dead was no excuse. D'hein, every bit D'aijeen's adoptive father, still found himself angry with Antimony.
It was unreasonable, and further unreasonable to let that anger slip against D'ahl. Particularly because there was no way D'ahl could know.
"Apologies," D'hein implored. "D'aijeen has long suffered from sleep-related abnormalities."
D'ahl nodded in patience, a gesture D'hein wished he had seen more often from the woman D'ahl resembled. "Perhaps you will recognize what she is experiencing, then. Come with me, I'll show you."
With that, D'ahl spun away to walked into her shadowed apartment, brown-blond tail swing behind her and throwing the robe away from her legs seductively. D'hein would not have looked were he not forced to. He may be perhaps a lecherous man to the women of his own tribe, but he did not wish to disrespect Antimony by objectifying her double. The thought was bizarre, and yet not as bizarre as the thought of D'aijeen doing so, and everything that implied. These ponderings disoriented D'hein and left him feeling as though he were trudging through water, reinforced by the shimmering of a hundred decorative mirrors on the walls of D'ahl's apartment. He knew the woman well enough to know that it was designed to specifically confuse, the mirrors interspersed with windows that were designed identically, causing one to question the difference between reflection and transparency.
By the time he arrived at the sitting room, his eyes no longer believed there was such a thing as windows. He looked out the massive windows that ran the towers outer wall and perceived them as mirrors, confusing his balance enough that he had to pause and breath. Inexplicable night wind blew in from opened windows concealed among the mirrors to his sides, soft moonlight reflected a thousand times. Glass wind chimes clicked like settling ice and through darting fragments of light over him, over the world. The view of Thanalan was reflected behind, above, below him. He felt like the floor around him were tumbling, but that he was stuck to it.
D'ahl watched him with a smile, patient with his discomfort. She enjoyed it. It continued for a long moment before D'ahl took a black tapestry -- a tribal pattern leftover from his tribes origins in the stony steppes west of Ul'dah -- and through it over what looked like a pane of glass in the room. But it had not been glass; it had been a mirror. And this simple movement stabilized the room in a moment. The mirrors and windows seemed to switch places in a sudden tumble, and only the floor beneath D'hein remained still. What he had thought were windows were in fact large mirrors, suddenly obvious, and there was now an open view of Ul'dah to his right through a small pair of windows -- in fact the only two in the room -- which he had not noticed before.
He heard humming in the suddenly static room. A large number of sofas and tables adorned it, shelves stacked high with glass figures that had been invisible moments before. He had also somehow failed to notice D'aijeen, who stood directly in front of one of the windows, staring tansfixed. His adoptive daughter, her skin the color of mud, her hair and tail a mossy green, was being attended to by D'ahl. The double-image of her mother, perhaps a few years younger, draped a silk night-robe over D'aijeen's otherwise naked body, the image bizarre. D'hein could almost picture D'aijeen being cared for by her mother, Antimony, out in the tribal wastes of the Sagolii.
The image took on a twisted air when D'ahl leaned forward to kiss D'aijeen's lips, and the man turned his gaze aside. The now-tamed mirrors in the room permitted the gesture, and he let himself feel the shivering ache of distress in his ribs.
The humming continued. Melodic, high in pitch, quieter than the wind. D'hein lifted his gaze back to where D'aijeen stood unmoved, eyes looking at the window as if she could see through D'ahl's body and watch the moon. For a moment, D'ahl met D'hein's gaze, and then she announced to him, "D'aijeen is asleep. It's distressingly adorable, isn't it? She does not wake from this spells until she is rested."
D'hein blinked at this, bundled up his resolve, and moved over towards the the women. He settled himself next to D'aijeen looking down at her face. The girl's blue eyes did not seem asleep. They wore a sad sort of wonder, and her lips moved. The humming was something exhaled from her throat, a slow and sad music. In her fingers, one of the glass figures -- a kind of drake, perhaps -- was being turned over and over between bother of her palms. Her digits moved over it strangely. She was feeling it, as though it were something unusual.
"What is she humming?"
"I don't recognize it," D'ahl answered, placing her face very close to D'aijeen's once more. "I've been listening. It's pretty. But I don't know the tune."
He turned to look out the window, "Is she looking at anything specific."
"Just clouds." D'ahl waited a moment before expounding, "She doesn't always look at the sky. She just stares at things in these episodes. There's no similarity between one thing and the next."
D'hein exhaled a sigh and brushed a lock of D'aijeen's hair behind her ear. "She's just sleep-walking, D'ahl." he turned his gaze on the woman, peering through his brown-blonde her to take her green eyes with his own green eyes. "I think we need to have a talk about your relationship with my daughter."
The woman looked D'aijeen over, was silent for a moment, and then smiled repulsively while she swooped forward, laying her cheek against D'aijeen's forehead and wrapping her arms around the the girl's shoulders. She eyed D'hein with an amused but unmistakable glare. "Your 'daughter' would disagree, as do I, D'hein Tia. And it is not why you came here tonight, is it?"
The ache in his chest resonated as he watched, and he tried to give it a precise identity. D'ahl was not a bad person. She was, in fact, one of D'hein's most trusted allies inside the tribe. And a good match for his daughter, normally. When D'hein had first found out about the intimacy in their relationship, he'd been glad, in fact. Why should such a simple thing as her hair change all of that? Because D'aijeen had requested it? It was not an unattractive hair style.
"You've become distracted, D'hein."
"Apologies." He shook his head slowly. "You're right, in fact, that I did not come here for this. Not that I would normally prescribe any reason to come to your home at night except I could not sleep but to see you." Even in his disturbance, the instinctive flirtation found his voice. Whether D'ahl was D'ahl or Antimony, she was still beautiful. "It's simply that we leave tomorrow for Ala Mhigo, you and I, so I wished to confer prior."
"Everything's in order," D'ahl said. "Poor D'aijeen will miss me, though, so I was letting her stay over."
"She'll have to go and stay with her sister and Drybone while we're gone. We don't want D'themia causing another incident if he decides he can force her to mate while we aren't around."
"D'aijeen and I have discussed this," D'ahl said, squeezing D'aijeen about the shoulders. The girl continued to hum and stare out the window. "She was frustrated but accepting. She is so enthralled by her sister I'm almost jealous."
"As am I," D'hein admitted, and shrugged. "There are some details I'd like to go over, but..."
D'ahl nodded to him, "But tonight I am dedicating time to D'aijeen. These spells only last an hour or two and then she goes back to bed. When she does, I intend to rouse her to discuss this." She fixed the Tia with a frown, "I do not believe this is mere sleepwalking."
"What does D'aijeen think?"
"That is personal," D'ahl's green eyes slipped closed, her voice turning boastful, "D'aijeen and I keep many confidences. Now, D'hein Tia, please leave. It is improper for a Tia to be in a lady's room after dark, and we would all be inconvenienced if you were to find yourself queued for punishment again."
He huffed, "Fair enough," and turned from the woman. As he did so, Dahl ceased giving him her attention, turning it instead to D'aijeen. As D'hein Tia walked away, he watched in the mirrors as D'ahl stared into the eyes of the supposed-orphan whom he had adopted. Years after taking her in, he had met her mother. Perhaps if he had not, he would not have realized the strangeness of D'aijeen's relationship with D'ahl. He made it all the way to the door of the apartment, catching steadily smaller glimpses of the girl and her confidant, glimpses of scandalous skin and strange closeness. He tried not linger too long on these things, choosing instead to assume that they were artifacts of assumptions on his part. Antimony was a lovely woman, so why shouldn't D'ahl resemble her? He had heard women were often attracted to men who looked like their fathers, so perhaps this was a similar thing.
"Oh, Aijee, why are you crying?"
D'hein stopped with his hand on the doorknob, glancing to an adjacent mirror. Through a series of a dozen fake windows, D'hein could see the sitting room, D'ahl staring into his daughter's eyes.
"Why are you sad?" D'ahl dabbed at D'aijeen's face with the sleeve of her robe. Her voice suddenly sounded very much like Antimony's voice. "My little Aijee. Don't be sad. I'm right here. Mom's here."
* Â * Â *
It was not until they had been out of Ul'dah for a week that D'hein finally found it in himself to say, "You do know how strange it is, right?"
D'ahl gave him a sideways look, her sweat-dappled face no longer resembling Antimony in any way. Her hair down, her demeanor different, and after a week of riding a chocobo all day through hot sun and cold night, the differences stood out. Her clothes were thick leather, her hair not only unbraided but messy and several shards lighter, younger. Antimony was a soft, studious woman, and D'ahl was decorated in muscles and scars. Her facial markings were similar, but different.
And her voice was smooth and deceptive like a politicians, bearing no hesitance whatsoever when she feigned ignorance. "What is strange, D'hein Tia? The way you wound yourself to the point of bleeding but cannot be bother to notice?"
"Yes. That is a strange and fascinating thing which I do." He stared forward at the blue horizon, smiling to himself of his very masculine and impressive tolerance for pain, that was not in any way the result of a damaged nervous system as some people said. They would be arriving in Ala Mhigo the next day, and he found all of these days of riding pleasant. He shook himself, "Dammit, D'ahl! No! You're trying to confuse me!"
"It is very easy."
"D'aijeen has you playing the part of her mother! And you're in it." He point. "She coached you on how to talk like her, right?"
"Yes," D'ahl answered, as though it were something to be proud of. "D'aijeen designed all of it. My hair, my voice, told me to use less complicated phrasing, and such as that."
"And that doesn't strike you as unusual?"
"Oh, at first I was completely..." D'ahl pondered for a moment, swaying back and forth with the movement of her chocobo. The wind caught her long, straight hair and blew it against her face, where it stuck in her sweat. Her pale skin had begun to turn red with sunburn days back. In fact, she hardly seemed feminine at all, much less to resemble Antimony in any way, except perhaps vaguely in the structure of her face, the color of her eyes? "At first it seemed nothing more than an unsettling and honestly revolting perversion."
D'hein was torn between the want to agree with D'ahl vehemently and the want to defend his daughter from some sort of insult.
"After a time," D'ahl said, "I perceived it as cute, and then as very sad. But it makes sense. I appear and speak as though I am her mother, and tell her that I love her, and am proud of her, and that I admire and cherish her every whim. And she cries sometimes, and I tell her that it is alright because I will always be there for her."
The Tia's jaw moved strangely, trying to imagine what such interactions must look like, but he could not imagine D'aijeen requesting such things be spoken to her, nor such words being honestly delivered in D'ahl's voice. But it would not be D'ahl's voice, would it? It would be D'ahl imitating Antimony's voice.
"D'hein!"
"What?" He snapped his gaze up, and then his chocobo suddenly bellowed a shrill, dramatic cry of warning and jerked to the side. The bird failed to avoid the mole under foot and toppled, sending D'hein rolling to earth. The mole shot off in one direction and his chocobo ran in panicked circles as the Tia kicked his way out of a stand of succulents, grunting in protest. "Dammit D'ahl!"
"Azeyma have mercy!" he heard the woman call. "Stop writhing! You'll only make it worse!"
"I'm fine!" He said, and pitched himself to his feet, finding himself unsteadied by the lingering presence of fleshy, green vessels on his body. He flexed his arm, feeling his robe and skin shift oddly, and paused with a subtle, "Oh," when he realized that several cactuses were joined to his flesh by a few hundred cactus needles. Many in his face. It didn't hurt.
"What is wrong with you!?" D'ahl shouted, jumping from her chocobo to run to his aid.
He actually chuckled, "I think it might be about time for me to admit that I might have nerve damage," he said. Then he turned his gaze to D'ahl and demanded, "Listen! Are you or are you not knowingly contributing to my daughter's incestuous perversions?"
"It's not sexual," D'ahl said, pulling on thick gloves and reaching out to take hold of the succulents. "Well, it is, because she and I are, and it's... but it's not just..."
"Don't cloud the issue, D'ahl!" He grunted when she ripped one of the succulents from his arm. It still didn't hurt.
"Be quiet, Tia! Oh, I wish I could hurt you." She shook a cactus in his face, "Your daughter is very sad and I'm doing what I can to comfort her. I have absolutely no desire to hear your thoughts on the matter. Now cease speaking of it or I'll shove this in your mouth and you'll never taste anything but cactus soup again!"
"But she hates her mother!" D'hein protested. "It doesn't make sense. And what if her mother turned up? Imagine how strange it would be!"
"I will not warn you again, D'hein Tia!" She pulled another cactus off his body. "Actually, while I have power over you, I demand you tell me why we're going to Ala Mhigo! Are we to aid the resistance?"
"No," D'hein answered. "I'm going to try to contact my superiors in the Garlean Empire."
D'ahl froze. "What."
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