Join, they screamed. Join, they wailed. Join, they pleaded. There was no order, no logic. One cry could not be distinguished from the next, and yet all were clear.
Be one.
Be whole.
Join.
Rurufa Rufa awoke with a sputtered start, enough to rouse but not to lift her head from the table. The study hall was dim, the candle at her table so near to guttering that for a moment it took the Dunesfolk a few moments to be sure she was actually awake. Rufa had thought that another member of the guild would wake her when the bells grew long, but this was the Ossuary, and its members understood that research needn't only occur during the waking moments of one's day. A blanket around her shoulders, placed there no doubt by a sympathetic thaumaturge, was the only sign that hadn't been there before was the only sign that she'd been noticed.
She took stock of her surroundings, taking in the shadowed rows of books along the walls, the haphazard stack of the same piled at one side of her table, and found that taking stock was a tricky thing - some part of her nagged her to return to sleep, to pass away the night. This, she thought, was unusual; the first few times she'd had the dreams she'd bolted upright, clutched her hands to her chest - bedsheet as well, if she'd remembered to go to bed - Â gasping for breath as if the sounds, the wailing, keening screeches, were strong enough to strangle. Shock, however, had begun to fade, and the sounds had become less a cacophony and more a lullaby, dragging her out of sleep only when the chorus hit a high or harsh note.
Finally rubbing sleep out of her eye with one hand, she used the other to examine the object of her study: the pendant resting in the open spine of a book at the top of the pile. Rufa slipped her small fingers through its silver chain. It was such a deceptively simple-looking thing, the wyrmtear: mottled brown and yellow, dull and a little unpleasant to the eye. It caught the little candlelight quite well, giving a hint to the observer that where was something more there, but only just. The less-informed might think it little more than a cheap semi-precious gem, and the jeweler who made the pendant a fellow of questionable taste, to set so ugly a stone into silver. She couldn't fault anyone for thinking that way - indeed, she commended them. Better to be less-informed and cast aside the jewelry than to be aware of its true value and seek to keep it.
She held it at eye-level, and brushed her hand against the gem's surface. Nothing. No new thoughts in her mind, no renewal of the song. Just the smooth, slightly chill texture of the stone itself. A spark of aether, though - a little bit of magic passed into the stone, and it would brighten sharply, the dull color of the gem giving way to a brilliant and golden glow. That was all it would take to reawaken the tear. And then to touch it again! Rufa shuddered at the thought, and found her free hand half-outstretched towards the gem again, her fingers already twisted in the familiar gesture she used to pass aether from her body into the object.
A quick shake of the head, and she set it down. No. Not tonight. The song was too near and, she worried, becoming too dear. Throughout her studies, contact had been inevitable - a brush here and there, willing or not, while examining the effects of aether of varying aspects upon the stone, the occasional outright grip as healthy caution in the face of an unknown artifact gave way to frustration when preliminary studies failed to bear any real fruit. A small list of minor offenses that was building up, she feared into a grander one. The last thing she wanted to do was prove those two miqo'te correct. The sneer on the Ishgardian's face as she'd been willing to threaten the entire Guild all for a trinket! It made Rufa's face sour and her grip tighten over the pendant's chain.
"What does it do, exactly?" she murmured to herself. It was a stupid question, one to which Rufa already had an answer, if the few Ishgardian texts she'd been able to acquire had been any help. Stones from the bodies of slain dragons. Heretical artifacts (but then they thought ideas were heresy, so what did that matter). Possibly a sentimental token for the Dravanians, a sign of those lost in the name of whatever their cause was, but then why did it have such an effect? "Rather, how does it work?"
"A curious materia you have there, isn't it?"
Where the dream had only half-woken her, the voice made her entirely so. Voices were suspicious things in the Ossuary - what might have been a a new initiate asking the quickest way to the loo could just as easily have been a voidsent beginning a moons-long process of corruption after escaping from a restricted artifact, and so caution regarding sudden acts of speech was a frequently-healthy course of action in the Ossuary. "P-pardon?"
In the dark, the speaker was hard to see, and still very much so when he approached into dim-light and pulled a seat out to join Rufa as if he'd been invited. She had to crane her neck up moreso than usual - Elezen then. "A materia. Like one of that goblin's creations. It doesn't remind you of that?"
Rufa took half-a-moment to give the man a better look. Bespectacled, his attire a bit shabby, but anything more than a cursory examination was deferred by the dark and the sudden and unexpected interjection of an idea. "Yes," she mused, twisting the chain from side to side to give it a better look. "It does. It even looks as if it's been fused to the necklace, but . . . clumsily so. As a centerpiece? That's odd. They're usually supplemental gems in pieces of jewelry." Her nose wrinkled as she considered the possibilities. Crude materia-fashioning from the depths of Ishgardian history? A strong possibility. Â She bobbed her head towards the elezen in thanks, her smile weary but relieved. "Gratitude to you, ser. That's a new angle entirely."
"No trouble. My apologies for the intrusion, of course. But I'd heard that the Guild was aflutter over this little item, and I was in the shelves, and, well . . . " He shrugged. "Something about the man who donated it was odd, I'm told."
She snorted. "Oh, yes, indeed. Hair of white and all in black attire, eyepatch over the one and a scar over the other. A parody of an adventurer, I'd say."
The elezen chuckled, leaning forward. "Why'd he hand it over, then?"
Rufa waved a hand as she set the necklace down, offering it to the man to examine. That she couldn't place his face was odd, but not so odd as to be odd. The Guild had many field researchers, and the flow of adventurers ensured there were always new faces. "Safekeeping, he said. Said he'd be back 'when we needed it most', but of course we've seen no sign since. He'd have made a good thaumaturge with that kind of bombast, don't you think?"
"Perhaps so." He twisted the pendant in his hand, examining it at eye level himself in much the same manner. "A small little thing, isn't it? Does it have any power to it? Was it worth the bombast?"
Here Rufa hedged. "It's . . . well it glows," she admitted, a little sheepish, her head bowed to avoid eye-contact. "Pump it with aether and it'll glow. Never mind the aspect - fire, ice, lightning, it all glows just the same. But it fades. And then - " She paused, the memory of the song echoing, and shrugged. "Well, it just glows."
"Hrm. You've found nothing else? Worn it? Touched it?" He offered her the pendant, palm extended. She snatched it back quickly, more so than she'd planned. "Surely it must have been worth more than that."
"Mayhaps," she conceded. "What I've dug-up says they come from slain dragons, from time to time. Read the old sagas and it's proof of foul dragons' deeds, quickly destroyed by whatever dragoon happened to be the story's subject." She slipped the pendant around her neck, pushing back her robe's hood enough to allow it. It felt better there. Easier to keep track of it. "Always the gorier sections, really. Stanzas about spilled blood and torn flesh and fallen stones."
"Ah, well," said the elezen, as if they had lit upon an answer waiting to be discovered. "That explains it, doesn't it? Blood's the thing."
"Blood . . . " Rufa ran her hand along her chin, peering off to the side of the shelves. It was a queer thing, the man said, but the average thaumaturge said five queer things before supper. And it was an interesting idea. "Beastkin? Spoken, mayhaps? Ought to start small."
He chuckled, and shook his head. She had a sense of longer hair, but it was . . . hazy, wasn't it? Darker than it should have been, even with the little candlelight that remained. It was hard to see his features beyond his spectacles. "No, I'd say the real thing. Dragon's blood." He rustled. There was a clink. A vial of red rolled across the table to bump against a book's spine.
Rufa's eyes widened and her arms scrabbled along the table to snatch up the vial before it rolled away, or worse, shattered. "Where did - why? This is restricted! How did you get this?!"
He folded his hands together, blithely ignoring the question. "You have to know, don't you? How long has this been eating at you? The guild is smarter than some old sagas. You have to decipher how this works. How often have you said that?"
The vial in one hand, Rufa rubbed at the bridge of her nose. "I don't - it's - this is - " They had training against this sort of thing. Corruption brought about by hubris. It was a common enough condition in the guild. There were seminars. Pamphlets. But with the pendant around her neck, the echo of the song seemed closer, as if it were no longer content to remain in dreams, crawling out of her slumber and into her waking mind.
She frowned, glancing down at the pendant. It did not glow. There was no charge. "Why?"
"Go on," he said, gesturing towards her with one hand. "You know why. You can feel it, can't you? The call. You've been close enough to it. Why not answer?"
"Why not . . ." She gave the vial a closer examination. The memory of the Ishgardian woman surfaced, and it made her angry, tightening her fist around glass. She had been a nuisance before, to be certain, but the thought - the thought of someone from that country breaking into the guild, threatening them, taking away what was hers, to be delivered to the enemy? Unforgivable.
A test, then. A test to see if she could control it. Her hand passed over the pendant, the slightest spark of lightning from her fingertips draining her stores of aether and restoring it to its full glow. She uncorked the vial. The man sat across from her, saying nothing. She thought to ask him what she ought do with it, but this close, it seemed simple, didn't it?
Join.
She raised the vial to her lips.
Be one.
Be whole.
Join.
Rurufa Rufa awoke with a sputtered start, enough to rouse but not to lift her head from the table. The study hall was dim, the candle at her table so near to guttering that for a moment it took the Dunesfolk a few moments to be sure she was actually awake. Rufa had thought that another member of the guild would wake her when the bells grew long, but this was the Ossuary, and its members understood that research needn't only occur during the waking moments of one's day. A blanket around her shoulders, placed there no doubt by a sympathetic thaumaturge, was the only sign that hadn't been there before was the only sign that she'd been noticed.
She took stock of her surroundings, taking in the shadowed rows of books along the walls, the haphazard stack of the same piled at one side of her table, and found that taking stock was a tricky thing - some part of her nagged her to return to sleep, to pass away the night. This, she thought, was unusual; the first few times she'd had the dreams she'd bolted upright, clutched her hands to her chest - bedsheet as well, if she'd remembered to go to bed - Â gasping for breath as if the sounds, the wailing, keening screeches, were strong enough to strangle. Shock, however, had begun to fade, and the sounds had become less a cacophony and more a lullaby, dragging her out of sleep only when the chorus hit a high or harsh note.
Finally rubbing sleep out of her eye with one hand, she used the other to examine the object of her study: the pendant resting in the open spine of a book at the top of the pile. Rufa slipped her small fingers through its silver chain. It was such a deceptively simple-looking thing, the wyrmtear: mottled brown and yellow, dull and a little unpleasant to the eye. It caught the little candlelight quite well, giving a hint to the observer that where was something more there, but only just. The less-informed might think it little more than a cheap semi-precious gem, and the jeweler who made the pendant a fellow of questionable taste, to set so ugly a stone into silver. She couldn't fault anyone for thinking that way - indeed, she commended them. Better to be less-informed and cast aside the jewelry than to be aware of its true value and seek to keep it.
She held it at eye-level, and brushed her hand against the gem's surface. Nothing. No new thoughts in her mind, no renewal of the song. Just the smooth, slightly chill texture of the stone itself. A spark of aether, though - a little bit of magic passed into the stone, and it would brighten sharply, the dull color of the gem giving way to a brilliant and golden glow. That was all it would take to reawaken the tear. And then to touch it again! Rufa shuddered at the thought, and found her free hand half-outstretched towards the gem again, her fingers already twisted in the familiar gesture she used to pass aether from her body into the object.
A quick shake of the head, and she set it down. No. Not tonight. The song was too near and, she worried, becoming too dear. Throughout her studies, contact had been inevitable - a brush here and there, willing or not, while examining the effects of aether of varying aspects upon the stone, the occasional outright grip as healthy caution in the face of an unknown artifact gave way to frustration when preliminary studies failed to bear any real fruit. A small list of minor offenses that was building up, she feared into a grander one. The last thing she wanted to do was prove those two miqo'te correct. The sneer on the Ishgardian's face as she'd been willing to threaten the entire Guild all for a trinket! It made Rufa's face sour and her grip tighten over the pendant's chain.
"What does it do, exactly?" she murmured to herself. It was a stupid question, one to which Rufa already had an answer, if the few Ishgardian texts she'd been able to acquire had been any help. Stones from the bodies of slain dragons. Heretical artifacts (but then they thought ideas were heresy, so what did that matter). Possibly a sentimental token for the Dravanians, a sign of those lost in the name of whatever their cause was, but then why did it have such an effect? "Rather, how does it work?"
"A curious materia you have there, isn't it?"
Where the dream had only half-woken her, the voice made her entirely so. Voices were suspicious things in the Ossuary - what might have been a a new initiate asking the quickest way to the loo could just as easily have been a voidsent beginning a moons-long process of corruption after escaping from a restricted artifact, and so caution regarding sudden acts of speech was a frequently-healthy course of action in the Ossuary. "P-pardon?"
In the dark, the speaker was hard to see, and still very much so when he approached into dim-light and pulled a seat out to join Rufa as if he'd been invited. She had to crane her neck up moreso than usual - Elezen then. "A materia. Like one of that goblin's creations. It doesn't remind you of that?"
Rufa took half-a-moment to give the man a better look. Bespectacled, his attire a bit shabby, but anything more than a cursory examination was deferred by the dark and the sudden and unexpected interjection of an idea. "Yes," she mused, twisting the chain from side to side to give it a better look. "It does. It even looks as if it's been fused to the necklace, but . . . clumsily so. As a centerpiece? That's odd. They're usually supplemental gems in pieces of jewelry." Her nose wrinkled as she considered the possibilities. Crude materia-fashioning from the depths of Ishgardian history? A strong possibility. Â She bobbed her head towards the elezen in thanks, her smile weary but relieved. "Gratitude to you, ser. That's a new angle entirely."
"No trouble. My apologies for the intrusion, of course. But I'd heard that the Guild was aflutter over this little item, and I was in the shelves, and, well . . . " He shrugged. "Something about the man who donated it was odd, I'm told."
She snorted. "Oh, yes, indeed. Hair of white and all in black attire, eyepatch over the one and a scar over the other. A parody of an adventurer, I'd say."
The elezen chuckled, leaning forward. "Why'd he hand it over, then?"
Rufa waved a hand as she set the necklace down, offering it to the man to examine. That she couldn't place his face was odd, but not so odd as to be odd. The Guild had many field researchers, and the flow of adventurers ensured there were always new faces. "Safekeeping, he said. Said he'd be back 'when we needed it most', but of course we've seen no sign since. He'd have made a good thaumaturge with that kind of bombast, don't you think?"
"Perhaps so." He twisted the pendant in his hand, examining it at eye level himself in much the same manner. "A small little thing, isn't it? Does it have any power to it? Was it worth the bombast?"
Here Rufa hedged. "It's . . . well it glows," she admitted, a little sheepish, her head bowed to avoid eye-contact. "Pump it with aether and it'll glow. Never mind the aspect - fire, ice, lightning, it all glows just the same. But it fades. And then - " She paused, the memory of the song echoing, and shrugged. "Well, it just glows."
"Hrm. You've found nothing else? Worn it? Touched it?" He offered her the pendant, palm extended. She snatched it back quickly, more so than she'd planned. "Surely it must have been worth more than that."
"Mayhaps," she conceded. "What I've dug-up says they come from slain dragons, from time to time. Read the old sagas and it's proof of foul dragons' deeds, quickly destroyed by whatever dragoon happened to be the story's subject." She slipped the pendant around her neck, pushing back her robe's hood enough to allow it. It felt better there. Easier to keep track of it. "Always the gorier sections, really. Stanzas about spilled blood and torn flesh and fallen stones."
"Ah, well," said the elezen, as if they had lit upon an answer waiting to be discovered. "That explains it, doesn't it? Blood's the thing."
"Blood . . . " Rufa ran her hand along her chin, peering off to the side of the shelves. It was a queer thing, the man said, but the average thaumaturge said five queer things before supper. And it was an interesting idea. "Beastkin? Spoken, mayhaps? Ought to start small."
He chuckled, and shook his head. She had a sense of longer hair, but it was . . . hazy, wasn't it? Darker than it should have been, even with the little candlelight that remained. It was hard to see his features beyond his spectacles. "No, I'd say the real thing. Dragon's blood." He rustled. There was a clink. A vial of red rolled across the table to bump against a book's spine.
Rufa's eyes widened and her arms scrabbled along the table to snatch up the vial before it rolled away, or worse, shattered. "Where did - why? This is restricted! How did you get this?!"
He folded his hands together, blithely ignoring the question. "You have to know, don't you? How long has this been eating at you? The guild is smarter than some old sagas. You have to decipher how this works. How often have you said that?"
The vial in one hand, Rufa rubbed at the bridge of her nose. "I don't - it's - this is - " They had training against this sort of thing. Corruption brought about by hubris. It was a common enough condition in the guild. There were seminars. Pamphlets. But with the pendant around her neck, the echo of the song seemed closer, as if it were no longer content to remain in dreams, crawling out of her slumber and into her waking mind.
She frowned, glancing down at the pendant. It did not glow. There was no charge. "Why?"
"Go on," he said, gesturing towards her with one hand. "You know why. You can feel it, can't you? The call. You've been close enough to it. Why not answer?"
"Why not . . ." She gave the vial a closer examination. The memory of the Ishgardian woman surfaced, and it made her angry, tightening her fist around glass. She had been a nuisance before, to be certain, but the thought - the thought of someone from that country breaking into the guild, threatening them, taking away what was hers, to be delivered to the enemy? Unforgivable.
A test, then. A test to see if she could control it. Her hand passed over the pendant, the slightest spark of lightning from her fingertips draining her stores of aether and restoring it to its full glow. She uncorked the vial. The man sat across from her, saying nothing. She thought to ask him what she ought do with it, but this close, it seemed simple, didn't it?
Join.
She raised the vial to her lips.
Verad Bellveil's Profile | The Case of the Ransacked Rug | Verad's Fate Sheet
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
