arkitect | (noct) ic inbox

tis just something that's been on my mind lately

the people we give up and leave behind in the course of becoming others
burying names to make room for our purpose

the crystal exarch had a name once
so did i
so did you

[There's a longer pause between messages, here. Enough of one to think that maybe he's refusing to respond, at least until:]

I never did care for confections. Hythlodaeus does, and Azem was swayed by them at times as well, but I have always found an excess of sweetness unpleasant.

They would sometimes say I looked as bitter as my drinks tend to be, when they assumed me to be in a mood.

[Once upon a time a man named Hades liked the taste of bitter things and had two friends who meant the world to him — enough so that when he thinks of himself, tis only natural for that conception to involve them in it.

It's such a little thing, but it has to be a little thing to make a significant difference. It has to be small and idle and inconsequential in order to stand up in the face of Emet-Selch the Ascian who seven times rejoined the shards or Solus zos Galvus who built the Garlean Empire or Hades the sorceror of eld, a massive violet monstrosity surrounded by the screaming faces of the people he sought to save.

Amid all of those people, there once was a man named Hades who didn't care for confections even though his friends did.

She'd felt like this about Haurchefant before, too — the Haurchefant here, the one who belongs to a warrior named Julien and not her. She'd had that moment where she'd had to come to terms with the idea that he was just a man and not a legend, not a memory, not a story. He's a man who smells like chocobo feathers and uses words like chartreuse to describe her eyes and liked things, real things, because having preferences is something that people do, not heroes and villains and legends.

The Crystal Exarch had a name once. It made him weep to hear it again after so long gone without it.]

were they right about your moods?

or did you only look bitter without really feeling that way inside

I don't see what it matters, frankly.

[-is the first response, because of course it is. He's always had that tendency to prickle rather than softening, to snap back whether he means it or not... particularly when someone is right about him. When he knows very well he was often in better moods in their company, despite the bluster over his white hair and the lines upon his face being all their doing (which, in fairness, was still somewhat true.)

But eventually, he does continue, though he still doesn't answer the last question.]

Burying a name, as you said, does not always mean burying the self entire. You and I and that Exarch of yours still recall who we have been, yet. Who we once were, and what lingers at the core of one's being.

I expect there are times you have looked into a mirror and felt you no longer saw the person to whom that name once belonged. I expect there are times you felt you did, all the same.

[That's two long pauses in as many responses, and while she'd gotten lucky with the first one, there's a significant interval of time in which Summer genuinely thinks there isn't anything more coming after the second. It's why she's already trying to come up with sentences that start with it matters because and I suppose it doesn't really matter but, only to delete them all over again when he takes the picture in her mind's eye and tilts it out of alignment, and forces her to regard it again.

He's right, she reflects at length. Burying a name doesn't mean forgetting who you once were. Sometimes it means acknowledging that you aren't the same person, but that's not the same as failing to remember.

Remember. Remember that we lived.]

i don't see her very much anymore

sometimes i wonder what that person ever did to warrant being hydaelyn's chosen
it can't have been anything much
there wasn't much special about her to begin with

but even if i had the choice i don't know if i would go back to being her

you would, though, wouldn't you?
going back to what came before was the point all along

The person Hydaelyn once was seemed to find a great many things special, regardless of their apparent significance to any other eye. Truly, there is no telling what her later self might have been thinking at all.

But of course I would.

[Even though he's been defeated, even though his duty is at an end-- if he had the choice, what else could he do? What else could he ever have done?]

Even if it were all to repeat, to unfold in the same way it already has, I would.

[The person Hydaelyn once was. It doesn't seem to make sense at first — not until old memories of the First start filtering back and piecing together in a way she'd never really considered before. Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the first and oldest and greatest of the primals. Elidibus, who was the heart of Zodiark until he was needed, and everything that followed from it.

If it's as Emet-Selch says, then Hydaelyn had a heart the same way that Zodiark did. Someone he once knew — mayhap even personally, the way it sounds. Hydaelyn was once a person, too, until she became something else.

Strange how neatly that fits into the theme of this whole conversation, upon reflection.]

i don't understand why
what is it that makes us so

[And now it's her turn for an uncomfortably long pause.]

are we really so inadequate next to what the star once was?

You would ask me this after all the effort I expended to remove your kind?

[Surely it's an obvious assumption. He ought to brush it off as a foolish question.]

Consider something for a moment. If you found yourself in a similar situation-- if the people you knew had all become others entirely, if they were still recognizable in some sense to you but had no capability to recall who you ever were to them: how adequate a world would you find this to be?

tis the situation i'm in right now, isn't it?
here in this place on this star

i recognize you
but you don't recall who i was to you
you know my soul is the right hue at least but that doesn't make me your warrior or your azem

i've been asked before how it feels to be forgotten that way
i can't pretend as though it isn't lonely
or that i'm not jealous and resentful sometimes that their friend is someone who isn't me

but
that doesn't mean i find them lesser or wanting
tis not my right to demand they remember me

the best i can hope for is that mayhap they'll still like me as they are and as i am
but mayhap they won't

They are still the same people, albeit ones who do not remember you. Not entirely unchanged, in some cases, as doubtless these... alterations in timeline, or whatever has happened, have led to the occasional difference.

But you do still know them. There is a difference.

[ And then, again, another lengthy pause follows, before: ]

how many rejoinings did it take before you were able to recognize some part of us?

I always knew the color of your souls, dim and faded as they were in the beginning.

But not until the shards were at least half rejoined did I recognize much I found familiar.

[She knows, deep down, that imagining her way through the the grim realities of the scenario he describes is wholly beyond her — would be beyond the capacity of any of the Sundered, probably. She tries anyway: remembers the surprise and shock and overwhelming relief of the moment when G'raha first found her here, and tries to imagine how it would have felt to turn around and discover a stranger standing there instead. How it would feel to know Aymeric as only the barest hint of blue and nothing more, a world with only grim echoes of Marcel and Obsidian and Haurchefant, only just enough to dig barbs in and leave the horror unforgettable.

She can't begin to imagine it, and even what little she can seems like abject misery.

And then she thinks: and what if someone promised me I could fix it, that I could have them back again, if I only —

Killed everyone, she reminds herself. Killed everyone ever living on all the shards and the Source besides. Thancred. Ryne. Hien. Ardbert. Her.

There was a timeline where he did, she reminds herself. There was a timeline where the First rejoined with the Source and Black Rose rose up and claimed her, and someone promised G'raha Tia that he could fix it, that he could have her back again, if he only —

No. No more. She can't.

There once was a man named Hades who didn't care for confections even though his friends did.]

when you made amaurot beneath the waves
why did you only make a shade for hythlodaeus

he said you must have thought of him while you were creating them
why only hythlodaeus and not azem

[He doesn't expect it to be something others can truly visualize, not without having lived through it the way he did. Not when they've never lived so long, never lost everything so completely. Emet-Selch never expects there to be true understanding, unsurprised that her questioning takes a bit of a turn.

But when it comes to that-- well. The answer is simple enough.]

Intentional or not, yes, I created his shade. But if you met them, you know what point in time they believed it to be.

[The beginning of the end. When they knew of the troubles beginning to plague their star, but none had yet reached their home.]

Azem was not there.

hythlodaeus told me that a member of the convocation opposed zodiark's summoning and defected

they shattered that member's memory crystal
but someone made another in secret

...
but the final days hadn't reached amaurot yet in the one you created
there were shades in the hall of rhetoric debating about it

[...]

about whether to intervene and help others who were already afflicted

that's where azem was
that's why azem wasn't in amaurot

Oh, of course he did. I really ought to have remade that shade of his.

[-he never would have, naturally. Not when it was so like his friend, not when he desperately needed the familiarity.]

That is where they were, though, yes. They would not suffer themselves to remain in the city and debate when others could be helped.

he also told me he had no way of knowing whether his actions were his own desire, or if he was simply following the will of his creator

i had my own guesses about that

[But moving on.]

tell me something
the last thing you remember before coming here was asking for the warrior's promise to remember the amaurotines, is that right

you don't remember the things elidibus did afterward?

I do not. The last thing I can recall is my own death; I had not yet entered the aetherial sea.

he stole the corpse of the
well
i suppose it would be of the azem shard that belonged to the first
one of the warriors tricked into flooding the shard with light

he thought he was meting out justice, i think
he called me death itself and sought to show me what he said were my crimes
twasn't that i stood in the way of his goal
more that he'd simply judged the star should not abide my presence in it any longer

but regardless when i fought elidibus something strange happened
he cast me into the rift and left me there to die with no escape

but what i don't understand is that i think it was you who saved me

and there's nothing i want more than to know why but i know better than to ask why
so what i want to know instead is how
how could it have been you that pulled me back from the rift if you were already gone

was that really some phantom of you
or was it something i did on my own and you were just...

the one i thought would save me from him

He was not unfeeling, for all that he could not remember of our home. To him, that was what you were; I doubt he could have recognized the person he once knew within you, and so you were but an instrument of Hydaelyn's will. Opposer of our own. Were it not for your intervention, all three Unsundered might live, but after you slew me... he was left to carry out his duty alone.

It is a terrible fate to leave one to, knowing they cannot recall the people they once performed their duty for. That there is so little left, save for that selfsame, unceasing duty.

Tell me something in turn: what became of him?

[Ah, she thinks as her eyes track slowly across the lines waiting for her on the tomestone screen, They left you alone, too. The last three Unsundered: Lahabrea, insane; Elidibus, with memories slipping away like so many grains of falling sand. And you.

He didn't answer her question, of course. Or maybe he just didn't answer the one she thought she was asking.

But he has a right to know, she thinks. As much as she had the right to know why G'raha Tia wasn't in the Crystal Tower when the Exarch took possession of it.]

he turned himself into a primal

he took control of the crystal tower and used it to summon armies of believers who wanted to be warriors of light
and used their faith to transform himself

he was smaller after we fought
small and sad

i gave him the constellation stones i found left behind in your amaurot

i think he recognized two of them
i don't know which they were
only the color and pattern of the stars

[That's not all that happened to him, either — but that's enough for right now.]

[It doesn't escape him, that she doesn't outright say he departed to the sea, but knowing that any of his former self seemed to be restored--

Well. For right now, it's satisfaction enough for his actions, and for what he left behind for that purpose.]

He was always smaller in our past as well. It seems as if he was somewhat restored, at the least.

How very like him, though, to have forced you to face others of similar faith.

restored?
i think so

he was wearing a hooded cloak like the other shades
but his was white
he was the one who always wore white wasn't he

i think of the two of you i understand him less than you
i know why you hated the sundered even if i don't agree we deserved it
but if elidibus hated us then it was different than your feelings i think

i suppose he'd loathe to know that i was even trying to understand him, right now

he said as much once
just before he forced me to kill monsters with the faces of my friends

Elidibus was his duty, moreso than Lahabrea or I ever were, not to mention the heart of our lord. The sundered were doubtless a reminder to him of the shattered state of the very primal he was a part of.

He was ever our Emissary; in forcing you to kill facsimiles of those you cared for, he meant to force you to confront what you had done to him. To us. To view another perspective, thrown into starker relief. That much he seems to have retained as a part of his duty.

to confront what i had done to him
well i suppose in the end that came full circle didn't it
now he gets to confront what he did to us

i wonder what right the ascians ever had to judge us
as though we asked to be sundered
as though we had any hand in it at all

there was never anything we ever could have done to be enough was there
we never had a chance even from the start

but you were the ones who decided we were half-things not truly alive just because we weren't like the people who came before us

and when you're the ones deciding it's awfully easy to set the rules and measures so that they come out the way you want them

did elidibus just not consider that we had a perspective too
did he think we were too broken of facsimiles to warrant one to begin with

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