The Anniversary (Story, OOC welcome)

[Fates Skein]

The Anniversary

 

The bar was jumping- men and women of all races and walks of life had filled the Drowning Wench nearly wall to wall.  Getting a table was completely out of the picture- getting a drink was an act of the Twelve.  Still, it was the one place she could go to get the kind of brandewine she wanted.

 

A Roegadyn, drunk already, stood up as she was slipping through the crowd and spilled his foul-smelling ale down her front.  The look on her face made him stumble back- it wasn't angry so much as cold, cold, cold.  In an instant, Anais had grabbed the half-full mug, ripped it out of his hand, and used it as a make-shift set of brass knuckles, cracking him across the jaw in a vicious left hook.  He fell to the ground in a heap and his friends, luckily, laughed at the sight of the small, slim Elezen woman taking him down. She dropped the mug on his unconscious form and stepped over him, heading to the bar.

 

Baderon was busy filling orders and he didn't look up at first when she used her sharp elbows to get herself a place along the wooden planks.  She waited, straining her patience, and when he finally had a moment and fixed her with a look it shifted from harried bartender to sympathetic old friend.  Turned, reached into the stock of bottles he kept in the back cupboard, and turned back to her, holding out a bottle of fifty year old cherry brandewine.  She took it without a word, turned on her heel, and marched out of the bar.

 

Once she was in the clear ocean air, away from the packed bar and the various smells and sounds of unwashed Eorzeans, Anais walked with quick steps to one of the quietest places in Limsa Lominsa- the docks.  The workers were all taking a holiday on the day of remembrance, so she weaved her way through the normally bustling boxes and bags of cargo, her steps finding a path through the rat's nest of rope without stumbling.  She finally sat down at the very edge of the pier, crossing her legs and dangling them over the edge and setting her bottle of liquor next to her.  The sun was starting it's descent in the sky, making the waves catch fire.

 

The Elezen woman closed her eyes and blindly grabbed for the bottle.  She uncorked it with her teeth, spit the cork into the water, and tilted it back, pouring the smooth liqor with the dry bite down her throat in a motion that reeks of desperation.  When she sets the half-emptied bottle back down on the pier, hard, she feels the fire bloom in her belly and lays back on the pier, staring at the racing clouds with satisfaction that she will be too drunk to dream by the time night falls.

 

6 years ago, the Sea of Jade

 

The red moon, Menphina's Hound, had broken through the atmosphere and hung above the world like a glowing promise.  The tides had been devastated by it's descent for days- the sea had responded to it's elemental pull by turning into a maelstrom, whirlpools developing in previously calm seas, waves the height of Sirius Pharos rising out of nowhere and causing devastation.

 

Anais had personally taken the wheel of the Black Lotus, her teeth bared and her face taking on an insane cast in the dark red light.  In her holds were three score refugees- old and young, men, women, and children- all of them counting on her to get them away from Ala Mhigo and the Garlean blockade that surrounded her by sea and air.  She had taken the black-lacquered ship with her strangely-shaped triangular sails through a hole blasted by the small cannons located on the lower deck but the Empire bastards were close behind.

 

The Void Flower had a moment to wonder if the damned moon was working for the Garleans when the boy in the crow's nest shouted at the same time that her carbuncles let out harsh screams in her head and suddenly winked out.  Anais' head whipped to starboard, just as the first massive key exploded out of Dalamud's glowing surface.  She saw the mushroom cloud of dust, debris, and bodies rise, even malms away, and dared a glance upwards.

 

"Captain!  ANAIS!"  Her first mate, Seax, a big highlander with an easy smile that normally made her heart contract, especially in the light of the candles of her cabin, was shaking her.  The sight of Dalamud cracking open like some ill-omened egg had stunned her like a strike to the side of the head.  Seax was staring at her and beyond him she could see her ship, her Lotus, starting to take on water from massive waves.  She shoved him out of the way with strength born from adrenaline and grabbed the wheel, heaving it to port.

 

The ship was a responsive vessel, made for maneuverability and speed versus war.  It leapt at Anais' touch and they managed to ride the waves as they came.  The screams of fear from the hold died down and she had a moment, a breath of frozen time, to think they might make it out of this.

 

That was before the flare struck.

 

It was chaos, madness.  The waves rose to a height so high that Anais couldn't even see the tops.  The shadows of sea creatures shone, backlit by the flare, in the moment before the wave struck her ship.  She was ripped away from the wheel and tumbled overboard, the rail striking her in the hip and shattering it.  Under and over, catching a breath of air here and a lungful of water there, she tumbled and rolled in the waves, hands reaching for her ship, for Seax, for a time when the world wasn't pain and saltwater and pressure on her chest.

 

She rose to the surface as a wave began to gather and, treading water frantically with two good arms and one good leg, Anais turned, seeking her ship.  She couldn't comprehend what she was seeing- spars of wood, cracked so that the black lacquer revealed the pale innards.  Blood dark as wine on the water, spreading from the wounded.  Men and women...oh gods...and children, floating like dolls with improbable, impossible wounds- missing limbs and skin burned black and heads stoved in so they looked like a destructive child had stormed in and torn her ship asunder like a play chest.

 

Here and there, crew and refugees floated on spars of wood that had broken off of the Lotus.  As she watched, most surrendered to the high waves and the boiling seas.

 

The Lotus was gone.  In an instant, her entire life and everyone and everything she loved...gone.  As she watched the highest mast crack and fall, the sails floating like bridal veils for just a moment before sinking, Anais stopped paddling, stopped treading water, and gave up.  She was the Captain, it was all she was and all she would ever be.  Without her ship, without her crew, she was nothing.

 

When she sank beneath the waves and the sounds of screams and cracking wood vanished, Anais let out her breath and welcomed the dark.

 

The Anniversary, evening, the pier of Limsa Lominsa

 

Of course, the problem had been that she did not die.  That's what was wrong with the gods- they take everything away from you then don't even have the common decency to accept your life and add it to the pile.

 

That was why she was here, too drunk to remain upright, laying on her back on the pier and staring at the stars as they shimmered above her in triplicate.

 

She had woken up onshore, on one of the small islands off of the coast of Thanalan.  Her body had somehow been hooked across the figurehead of her ship- a woman with her eyes blindfolded and the tail of a sea serpent, holding a flowering lotus- and had floated with the chaotic tides until being cast ashore.  When she rolled over and felt the pain of her shattered hip, the torn muscles in her arms and chest (a relic of trying to steer the ship away from destruction in those last moments), the emptiness in her heart, Anais had screamed and screamed and screamed, until her salt-ravaged throat had bled and she was forced to swallow or drown.

 

She had been found by a passing Limsan patrol- seeking survivors, they said- and had been healed by the ship's doctor and borne back to the city she had sailed out of only weeks before.

 

She had started drinking that night.  And she had not stopped until the day she saw the brilliant yellow of Obsidian Hornet's armor in the Drowning Wench.

 

The bottle of brandewine floated in the water, having rolled off.  The gentle 'thumpthumpthump' of the empty bottle against the pillars was just loud enough to drown out the quiet, helpless sounds of one lost Elezen woman, weeping at the providence of life.