Checheyigen Malaguld,

Fire-Eyed

we left you in the house of still air
with mugwort, yarrow, and dry grass
your spirit passing through my hands
said, "remember everything."


ONCE upon a time--

--a girl was born to a loving family who wanted for nothing, nothing at all, and her parents named her Gaia; she grew into a beautiful and kind but short-tempered and cunning young woman, and named herself Loghrif, the Transcendent, and took her seat among the Convocation of Fourteen.

And despite her best efforts, in a deluge of horrors, under skies set afire, she died.

+++

--a girl was born to a loving family who wanted for nothing, nothing at all, and her parents named her Checheyigen; she grew into a beautiful and kind but short-tempered and cunning young woman, and all agreed she brought pride to the name of Malaguld in her actions; but her heart was haunted by fire, and it drove her out, beyond the hard-won comforts of home, to seek her destiny across the seas.

And despite her best efforts, in a deluge of horrors, under skies set afire, she --



I heard a story ...

Merchants who tell tales of their trade in the New World sometimes regale their friends with stories of a quiet, forceful girl with horns swept back like blades who lived among the Whalaqee and learned how to master the magic of beasts with the same intensity with which she could channel the thaumaturgical heritage of her wisest grandmothers, the reckless curiosity that drove her forward and the strange shyness that came over her at the thought of departing her second home. But leave she did, they say, and who knows what happened to her after that?

+++

The soldiers of the joint XIVth/IVth Legion force tasked with maintaining the "peace" of Dalmasca Inferior would tell a different tale to the surviving members of a long-since-redistributed Resistance cell as to where an Au Ra might've come to cross blades with Garlemald in the jungles of Golmore--
the Legions assumed her another survivor displaced during the pacification of the territories, fallen in with the rebels instead of washing up by Terncliffs like her more fortunate peers, but the Resistance would tell you they knew better: Garlean shells hulled the merchant ship she'd been on, and it was only poor rat bastard luck that meant the ones that found the survivors were barely surviving Garlean patrols as it was.
--but both tell the same story, of brimstone ferocity and desperate drive, a rabid cunning that saw Garlean steel, ripped from the hands of corpses, twisted to serve as magical foci when wood and ceramic had long since shattered under the strain - and of the storm that rose up around the Garlean base that one fateful night, and the Weapon-light that blossomed high into the sky like a terrible flower even as the rains swept soldiers and rebels alike away in a flood, all of them like ants in the face of a cruel god's laughter. Whether they claim it was the roiling darkness of the flood or the fury of the boiling skies that she fell beneath, they'll all claim the same: after that night, they never saw her again.

+++

It was the mages of Arrzaneth Ossuary who recommended the strange-eyed Au Ra to the officers of the Immortal Flames for possible recruitment, some said; others said they didn't need to, as her furious performance upon the bloodsands, displaying unheard-of magics in the arena as the jeering menace of the Masked Carnivale it fell upon the burgeoning ranks of the then-new Blue Mages' Guild to defeat, was recommendation enough. But none pretended it was anything but a lucky resistance to tempering that led to her induction into the officers' ranks. And none would speak as to why it was that, as swiftly as she rose through the ranks, she just as swiftly received her final pension and quietly sunk into the obscurity from whence she'd first arose.

She was a good Captain, though; they all agree on that. With eyes like hers, they shrug and say, quaffing back another ale, maybe she burnt out.

They say, sometimes, they say sometimes there's an Au Ra girl with white fire in her eyes that lives in the ruins of ancient Allag, that keeps herself as much a secret treasure hidden from the world as the cities of Amdapor and Mhach, and if you're brave enough to go deep enough into them you'll catch a glimpse of her walking among them, for just a moment. But who's to say if they're telling the truth? After all, it can't be the same one at every one ...

+++

Then again, they tell a lot of stories, don't they? Certainly, none of them really seem to reflect themselves immediately in the eyes of the careful-spoken xaela you've just met, moon-bright limbal rings aside. Whether you've met her quietly working the floor as the single-minded and sharp-tongued "security guard" of the Azure Lance, or simply encountered her fitted awkwardly among strangers ... it doesn't seem possible someone like her could carry so much history within her. She's too hesitant, too careless, too foolish ... no. She's just Checheyigen, after all.



This is not The End.

the root that grows in darkness:
it does not belong to you.
still the hand that severs the holy root.
thieves -- destroyers -- it never belonged to you.
thieves -- destroyers -- false harvest brings sorrow.


All relevant concepts & characters © FFXIV. All rights reserved.

( Made with Carrd )