The Dog Star Falls | FFXIV

the dog star falls

It's peaceful. A permanent quiet under the sea, the distant sound of water from far above. There is a calming blue light from the moon or the sun, he did not know nor wish to know which it was. His footsteps click as he walks through the hushed silence, the tall shades of Amaurotines speaking echoes of the past words over and over again.

He made his way to a roof. The Warrior wouldn't be taking advantage of the rooms and halls available to him - Windows are too hard to prise open, doors, elevators and stairs too difficult to navigate.

No, Emet-selch finds the Warrior crouching sentinel at the top of one of the highest buildings, no doubt carried there by his wings. His voice clicks and makes an indistinguishable noise when he approaches, some mix between the hoarse sound of a faulty throat and a word from language forgotten. His head turns in a fashion discordant to his neck, his body remaining still.

The Warrior's hair is long and lank, dripping with light, and his face is entirely blank of emotion. He looks worse than when Emet had left him - but of course, he had left him a sundered man and returned to a beast. The remnants of sin, black liquid dripping, course steadily from his mouth and across his throat, staining his cheeks. Where his eyes were a pale blue of a misty winter sky, now lay only white film, no pupil to be seen, black tears on cast white skin.

He is also larger. Limbs elongated, nails and bones twisted into new shapes, his skin is bare and intersected with veins of gold, stretched taut to accommodate his new gaunt and eldritch structure. He is a creature that stands the height of Vauthry's lions, elegant wings terrible and dripping, one worthy of bringing ruin to his makers, engorged by the sheer amount of light that he had been dedicated by his friends.

And he is luminous.

He is gone.

Emet-selch contemplates, a hand reaching out to mindlessly touch some of the feathers, caring not of the tacky substance and flowing gold that marred his gloves with the contact. The feathers ruffle, and the Warrior's head tilts minutely at him, a squelch resounding from his neck doing something it wasn't designed to do.

Emet-selch stares back unblinkingly.

Bells ago, the Warrior had the sense to steal away to him in the early hours of the morning - the light naturally still billowed down like rays of sunlight through water, he walked through Lakeland like he had at the beginning of his journey to the end, and he was welcomed with open arms. He had been quiet, he had been reserved, and Emet had so kindly spared him dialogue. Afterall, there's no dignity in dying when your only company was someone who was relentlessly harassing you, and so he remained silent, walking the Warrior through to a peaceful resting place in the ghost of Amaurot.

The only sounds he eventually gave Emet were the gargled chokes and coughs that came when the light became too much, before the transformation came that Emet could not bring himself to see.

He couldn't say why.

Well, yes, he could in fact.

He knew that afterwards, nothing that was familiar would remain. He knew there would be no laughing eyes even on the most serious of faces, no scruffy chin, no voice (should he have deigned to use it) that sounded exactly like the home that they had once lost. His rough skin would become smooth and unmarked as fresh porcelain, his eyes would gloss over, and the transition would hurt.

(For both of them).

For there was nothing that the Warrior had as in common as Azem than the sound of his voice, and what else would he hear but his screams in due time?

And so he had left as soon as the coughs and groans began, to let the Warrior suffer in solitude, and returned to see what he had become in morbid curiosity. What should he find but someone so spent on light there was nothing left of the man that once was, the one who was once 8/14ths his old friend?

The Warrior of Light indeed, ready to become his maker's ruin.

Emet-selch lets out a sigh, and steps up onto the same ledge his Warrior perches upon. The Warrior jolts a little at the sudden movement, head shifting to nearly nudge the top of his head; but settles when he notices that all Emet had done was sit down beside him. He gazes a little more - but Emet's citrine eyes are no longer on him, though his hand remains resting on his feathers. His neck twists to where Emet looks, straining through tears of sin and a gauze of light to see something in the horizon.

Spires stretch towards the sky, people make their way through the streets. They sit side by side, in each other's company for a while.

The stars are beautiful.