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ARIADNE MILLER

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She'd come from up river, a twiggy figure in a carbon fiber boat. Slipping south down the spillway under the glow of a Fringes moon, she carried three parcels of interest: a satchel, folio papers, a flatpack cornered tight with burlap. Looked too small for a gun case. Even in the low light it wasn't hard to tell she'd come prepared, tightened things down, had a few analog gauges strapped on the gunwales with catgut and resined twine. Could never be too cautious. She had a look on her round face like a shadow, coal-black hair pulled back tight and high above a furrowed brow. Eyes keen, dark, and wet as saltwater seals. The current gurgled along the Garlean skiff until rocks jagged a hard cut that sent it veering right, and she poled off a calamity with an oar and a strong right arm. Crisis averted. Thank the Destroyer the dock wasn't far. A few more malms and there'd be a campfire, hot water and kudzu soap, a tent, a chance to check in on the others. She leaned back and let the boat slide back into the central stream. Eyes closed, ears open. The hydra roar of the Old Velodyna.She could be anybody, if the boat got stopped before the dock. A trader, a wanderer, a gleaner who missed the last caravan. Some killers have friendly grins. If she lay perfectly still on the skiff bottom and wrapped tight in the cream oilcloth she could be pretend to be a corpse in an old clan burial. Elders used to say they'd tuck away the shrouds into vessels smeared bleakwhite with chalk and Spinner lilies, and once the river coaxed them of sight the loved ones would stand ashore and weep a last prayer for the departed.Except it was myth. No one in her village ever went that way. Even as she pondered it the river was whispering up an answer, quick as math and just as solid: no Lambsrocker worth his grit would ever make such waste of perfectly good boat.

Connections and RP Hooks

⬩ FOR HIRE - Ariadne was once a recruitable agent, with a dispensation on file at the Adventurer's Guild for commendable, clean work. In affiliated directories and contact lists, she is cited as a mercenary, engineer, machinery repair specialist, marksman, investigator, and courier—but street rumors affirm she has no qualms about less savory business deals that take place off the books...⬩ HEART IN YOUR FIST - turns ago, this gun-toting marksman took up a more austere path: tutelage in the way of the Fist of Rhalgr. Rumor has it she and her master were banished from the cultist sect of Rhaoism, only to disdain from joining any other path and instead embracing the title of 'exile.' Other monks or individuals adjacent to the Path may have heard tale of the aspirant—or have perhaps witnessed the destruction she and her master are prone to leave in their wake...⬩ WANDERING WASTELANDER - beyond the hills and mountains of northern Gyr Abania there stretches a vast wasteland where light and the law of the land fails to reach. Into this eerie wasteland the gearhead often disappears, and what she gets up to there with her mayhem crew of Disposables is a mystery you may not wish to solve. Do not venture into the Wastes; stay there too long, and they will make to venture into you, and leave you arid as their foreboding sands...⬩ GYR ABANIA - hailing from the high-altitude village of Lambsrock, Ariadne knows well the foothills, ridges, and trails of the mountainous region surrounding the Velodyna. She offers up her origins pretty freely to any who ask. Despite a previous reticence, she has recently taken up endeavors to keep regular communication with fellow Gyr Abanians, especially if they did trade on the old river.⬩ SALVAGE SPECIALTY - rumor has it that this industrious young woman has tilted her work toward favor for salvage and disassembly runs across the east. She is a noted market contact for selling or procuring salvaged mechanical goods, parts, and other sundries. Therein lies the possible purview of similar pursuits: gleaning, acquisitions, and treasure hunting...⬩ 'TIL SEA SWALLOWS ALL - Miller's official records show that she served with the Maelstrom, achieving the rank of chief petty officer signalman aboard the Stella, a 3rd squadron frigate. Her Navy records end with a medical discharge, redacting what appears to be a dishonorable discharge that was thrown out following a court-martial. Anyone familiar enough with navy clerks or staff officers could easily hear the gossip about an incident, a trial... In fact, you could ask her yourself, but she might not give you whole facts or a straight answer. Remember: loose lips sink ships.⬩ 'LET'S SOLVE PRACTICAL PROBLEMS' - like, coming up with a hook or connection that you don't see here. Got any ideas? Send them along and we can set up a shootout scene...

Stories and Writing

THE LITTLE GODS OF THE GREATER VELODYNA

Here is the river. Beside a salt marsh crossing, where turtles sun and fish fly-leap and herons blade white slices through the reeds, the woman crouches on the bank beside a hunk of burlap. She is alone. A cookpot rattles on the campfire behind, and over its clustered coals lemongrass and kudzu leaves are wilting like failing hands. Sweet grey smoke slipstreams up and hazes away most of the mosquitos, for now; by cold nightfall she’ll be able to bedroll without a net. For now she lets the tangy haze breeze over her as she watches the river, the chattering water, the cobalt-gray burbling carrying silt, salmon, and seventy-nine generations of troubles down to the snarling falls. There’s blood on her face, not hers. A black spot below her left eye, like a punctuation mark. She is thirty summers old.Today she killed a man, a counterfeiter who’d had the burlap lump in his wagon. Yesterday she killed men: two three-eyed bounty hunters who came up on her in the Stripes, set off her trap, blew themselves into tiny bits all over the arroyo after inadvertently tipping her off about the counterfeiter. And a long time ago, before these crooks and this cookpot, she killed a ship captain aboard the Stella on a dim, hot day at the maw of a tempesting sea. She is always killing somebody, this woman.The cookpot bubbles. She squints through the smoke to check the lid. Burgoo with fish heads, wheat biscuit, a palm-sized crunch of rock salt and bird’s eye chilis. Coughing, she stirs the pot. She would murder someone for one of Rikke’s watermelon sodas. O Mystical Spinner, all the things over which we’d destroy our brethren.O burlap hunk. O dead hunters, limbs festooning the arroyo. O ship captain and his drop of the deep blue sea. O daughter of the salt swell, lift your lily-laden arms to light paper lamps wandering downriver, like pale pilgrims, and entreat us poor lambs to honor the bones of our ancestors in the memorial dust.“Shut the fuck up,” she mutters aloud, startling a nearby heron. In a fright it lifts off, its wings shadowing the burlap lump like a sail as it flies away.

Like most, she had kindred. When reminiscing she always began with the grave father, a soot-haired tower of a man named Thoris. Like his father and his father’s father, his father’s father’s father and every stalwart uncle between them he had worked the river mills in a town gouged out of the northern Gyr Abanian peaks. After supper he’d retire to a clay-walled room of their modest house and, with a delicacy incongruous to a man who hefted ninety-ponze flour sacks all day, dip a quill in ink and pass a quiet bell writing river almanacs. Moons and meteor showers, temperatures and climes, river heights and surges. Births, deaths, bondings eternal, and the names of any traveler who passed through.Because she was the quietest of his loud children, he let her linger there in that lamplit column of bookshelves. But sometimes she asked questions. Such as, why’d they name it Lambsrock?Well, that’s the name of a baby karakul. A lamb.There ain’t no karakul here, Baba.There used to be, he replied, and that was all. No further explanation offered. That was his way. Not even pressing questions such as 'how do bees make honeycomb,' 'why’s the sky blue,' 'why’s the Destroyer’s beard almost longer than He is tall' got him to look up from his withered pine desk and the parchment pages he labored over under a smoky lamp.He taught her to read. Books were rare in a backwoods town, and when she ran out of fairy-tales and levin-tracts she had to settle for the dense, unwieldy repair manuals stowed away on the archive’s lowest shelves. How to set a bedstone. How to adjust the furrow pattern for millet instead of wheat. How to clean-caulk a skiff with a sharp chisel that could slice off a little girl’s thumb. How to properly blind and hitch the rotary donkey so it wouldn’t chomp your stupid brother when it saw him coming with the saddle.How come she never has to do as much as we, Loras would whine as they doctored his bite marks.She does near as much, just does it quicker’n you.Ain’t so.But it was, and her brothers knew it. They had a prodigy for a sister. Her sails always flew straight and her scow never took on water. Any broken toy brought and placed before her would be mended by noontime, and should ever she suffer mischief at the hands of the many rowdy sprogs of the blacksmith, the barrel-cooper, the launderers and the hairy dairyman who ran the white-timbered inn both Loras and Adrian were guaranteed to be after them with sticks. Children’s games and gambles aside, there were limits. Picking on weird little Ari was theirs.Ariadne, she would spend the rest of her days telling people, my name is Ariadne. It isn’t ‘Ari.’ Don’t call me that, please. I’m practically begging you. I know it’s an unusual name, but it shouldn’t be shortened. The whole thing, or nothing. Just call me ‘Miller’ if you can’t get it right.Which, until the sea captain, most couldn’t.

Evening crawls in. She breaks camp and hitches the draft chocobo, heading up Fetter’s Ridge to a flat overlook above a northern bend of the river. Here she dismounts and unloads, throwing down bedroll, box-lamp, the dog-eared folio with her new rifle schematics. The burlap hunk she handles more carefully, adjusting its kudzu twine bindings. Imagine going through all that murderous trouble to acquire it, she thinks, only to have it break.She sits against a rock and takes out some whittling. The knife whispers soft against the block of lindenwood, which she aims to transform into a cactuar. Above, stars are blinking in. The Ewer burns incandescent phosphorus-white against the gunpowder sky. She looks up and thinks it’ll be a good night for sleep until she notices an unusual crimson spangle circling the Spire.A red comet. She hasn’t seen this one before. With a tail like a bleeding vein it flags bright above the Dragonstar. A bad omen.“Whatever,” she says, ducking back to her whittling. “Omens are bullshit. Stars are bullshit. You”–she points the whittleknife blade up at the red blaze–“are bullshit, and I don’t care what you’ve got to say.”She imagines the comet replying coolly, yes you do.“No, I don’t.”You most certainly might. How many nights is this, now? Five, six? When’s the last time you had a proper conversation with somebody who was breathing and alive?“Leave me alone.”You are alone right now. Talking to me, which means technically to yourself.“That's up for debate."Then what are you doing?“If you had eyes, you’d comprehend I was busy. Doing stuff, y'know? Things.”Busy making a mess. Ruining good wood. Leaving shavings. Burning oil at both ends.“Damned right.”Whole lot of work you put into messing up everything you touch.She turns and spits into the dust. The whittleknife’s silver edge knicks her thumb but thanks to the padded callus it doesn’t bleed. Mumbling, she sucks on it anyway. A bad habit.“Had you been paying any attention you would’ve known I came upon something big,” she says smugly. “Something important, for a change, and not salvage. A genuine article. The great maternal mysteries, one step closer to being solved.”The comet winked. Is that so?“Sure as shootin'."Sounds unlikely to me."One of the actual Droplets. A legend made form. That old faker didn’t even know what he had.”I don’t really think you know what it is, either."Is that so?"Yes. You haven’t even really sat down and opened it up, have you? The wrapping's still on. You haven't even untied it."I don't wanna risk breaking it."Grumbling, the comet flared. And that’s your problem, it argued. Since when has risk been an obstacle for you? Underneath that burlap you might have caught a glimpse of the outline, a vague idea of the ceramic face, enough of a preview to convince you it was worth filling a man’s chest with aetherically-fluid lead. But the fact that you’re sitting here loafing and carving and dicking around on a mesa and not actually inspecting the thing is extremely telling.Slow, susurrating scrapes of the knife fill the pause until she murmurs, "telling of what?"Avoidance! Chicken-shitting is what you're doing, the very definition of it. You’re so fucking scared that statue won’t be what you think it is and that the mistake cost some petty criminal his life that you’re putting off even the possibility of facing even the very chance.“Guilty as charged.”Gods, you really are a nightmare. How does someone so smart turn out so unbelievably dumb?Now she cracks up, laughing at her own dismissal, snickering eh-he-hee. “And yet, you gotta admit, under a certain light it has its charms, nay? Realistically speaking, one can only be as intelligent as they perceive themselves capable. Perception is relative, so possessing an adaptivity of perception is a potential denotation of a superior mind. A blueprint, a petit-four, a table for mahjong. What do these all have in common?"Things you suck at making, says the comet."They're all rectangles."But mahjong's played in a—"Square? And there's her gambit. Should the opponent argue on interpretations of shape rather than acknowledging the conclusive definition of the equilateral rectangle, he has invariably missed the point and rendered himself more a sycophant for a myopia of detail. And thus I see him. His insipid scheme revealed. He thinks me inaccurate, but I know he is a fool."Silence. The box-lamp flickers. In the distance, canine yapping kicks up from the bloodhemp scrub, the yow-yow-yow of scavenger dogs on the revel."Just you wait," she says, tucking the knife into the arm of the linden cactuar. "The moment approaches. No string floats forever. And when we get there, I'll tie off that knot for good."Whatever, sighs the comet, winking out of sight. In your dreams.

The sea captain–no. She endeavored not to linger on him anymore. The phantom memorial voices in her mind that did not belong to comets or clarions or the calculations for balancing heat exchangers instead all came from her mother. Praise from her father she treasured, for from the other parent flowed a stream of criticism without end.Too fast, came the burbling, dovelike cry from the hot room framed in larchwood. Too quick! What were you doing to my loom?Fixed it, Mama. Give it a try.Did you? How? What part did you touch? What did you replace?I didn’t replace nothing, see? It were a loose heddle, that’s all. Try!Staring hard at the child through eyes the color of rainwater, her mother would frown. Then how do I know it is truly fixed?Because it works?It will break again. It alway does. Next time, you must show me.Mama, just try it, will you? Finish your pattern.Her mother’s name was Vita. She was not from Lambsrock. Some fifteen summers earlier Thoris had eschewed local tradition and arranged to meet a strange girl from a secluded mountain hamlet some fifty malms northeast where all the patriarchs had died from plague. The townsfolk took it poorly. Seventy-eight generations of tradition ignored for a sick mountain lark. When they first saw the bridal skiff gliding the curve of the riverbend they scowled, shook their heads, made the sign of the Destroyer. The prowhead had a wheel. Here the river delivered unto one of their finest sons a dour maiden in quilted white, her sleeves like bells, her veils ringed with lilies pale as snowpack. Beside her, two ancient crones with stone-haggard faces helped her onto the dock and presented her to the sweating, hook-nosed husband. No drumbeats or stormsongs. Instead, a ceremonial of sighs.That otherworldly wedding wasn’t recorded in any of the village ledgers, but she knew it, could envision it like a picture the moment she closed her eyes. But whenever Ariadne thought of her mother a cold plunge would creep up her ankles, as if she were wading along a winter bank.Thus she tried to think as little about her as one possibly, impossibly, could.

Moonrise wakes her thirsty. She sits up and stretches, aching from napping pretzeled under the ersatz blanket of her coat. In her fatigue she dozed off without feeding the chocobo. A quick inspection reveals the oblong silhouette of a long neck rooting through a sack of turnips discarded beside rifle, bedroll, and lump. O self-sufficient steed.She pops the cork on a bottle of bourbon and snaps her goggles down tight around her eyes. A switch on the right lens controls a mode for infrared scanning, which she flips on. The sky blacks out and the metal frieze of Baelsar’s Wall abruptly censors the Dimwold canopy.The comet has crawled west. It steams burdensomely above her, a tocsin with a tail."Want some?" she asks, hoisting up the bottle.No, thank you."More for me, then."Ari, I think we got a problem."Hah." She unwraps a wad of butcherpaper and takes out a floury lump of hardtack. "That's for sure."You need to quit drinking."When I'm dead."Oof, tick-tock.“Ch’risma, you’re a sassy one. What's got you so unpleasant? Oh, I know–you’re probably feeling a little jealous of my big find. Is that it? Well, that’s on you, buddy. You should try being useful." Munching, her mouth full, she mimics a ball throw with her hardtack hand. "Go scare an astrologian or somethin’. Go fuck the moon.”Silence. The breeze fumes delicately. The chocobo, her beak full of turnip, settles in the dust with a feathery gump.She leans back to eat amid dust and wood shavings. "It just feels good to actually make progress, you know? On work, on the workshop, on the atavistic mysteries of life. All this wandering out here was getting a little lagsome, but this has perked me up something fierce."You got bigger issues at hand."You're telling me. Anyway, this one's a lifechanger. A real stroke of luck, which I needed. Ain't been so stellar in that department as of late."Tell me about it.Through dry, biscuity bites, she mumbles, “what’s that supposed to mean?”Looked west lately, genius?“No, why?”I think you should turn around.She sets down the hardtack. Swiveling, she peers into the dark, adjusting the longsight on her goggle gauges. Beyond the river a rock bridge leads a winding, narrow passage down to the arroyo some three malms off. She cranks the gauge of her lens to maximum magnifcation and spots an orange blur limning the ridge.Heat from a lit fire.Her stomach jumps into her throat.Cursing, she packs up in a flash and guides the bird back down the ridge. Those bounty hunters were dead. This was a fact: no amount of chirurgy or Garlean technological splendor could save a man whose body was blown to the visceral consistency of Heavensturn confetti. But the counterfeiter, he was the problem. The mental image of his body weighed heavy on the scales of her galloping mind. She’d put a bullet in him (check) and he’d bled out (check) and gone limp in the dust like a sack of birdseed (double check). But in the pressing urgency to escape with her burlap prize she hadn’t made sure. Hadn’t double-tapped or done due diligence regarding his pulse: a big red ‘x.’ The most rookie of fuck-ups.The bird snuffles wearily. A long time ago some Ishgardian had named the creature Phèdre. If she keeps fucking up, lingering out here hot-brained and soft-headed and fake-arguing with wandering stars, someday somebody's going to find purple Phèdre out here wandering aimless. Dragging along by the stirrup a booted, begoggled, bedraggled comedy of a corpse.In the distance, the comet keeps on twinkling, a red-hot slash of disappointment in the sky.

Part II

• Return

THE LITTLE GODS OF THE GREATER VELODYNA, PART II

Along the riverbank, she rides hard through a choral of midnight frogs. Geeryup, charrup, they chant as the dark shape of chocobo and rider glides past. In the mud, eyes in gleaming marble pairs watch her go, unblinking, reflecting weak moonlight. She studies them in return with a black glare. Sarcosuchus.Don’t leave the water, she thinks loudly at them. Come out of that muck and I’ll shoot.At a stony bank bottom she decides to cross. Even in the dark the bird can handle it, but the lack of light makes her uneasy: too many sarcos. She flicks a switch on the custom fine-tuned vanadium-steel alloy aetherotransformer pack hanging off the saddle panniers, and the battery gauges blinker on to throw just enough blue light to guide the chocobo’s feet.On the other side, fresh boot tracks. Her heart skips. Someone with rubber soles came down from north and stopped at this bank, crushing swales and chickweeds, leaving an indelible depression in the watery sod. It has to be the counterfeiter. Maybe he stole the Imperial’s boots and clambered down here to get fresh water. She looks out into the windy hot night and scans for hints of licking firelight, warm washes by which to triangulate him. It doesn’t take long.These old hills are home, these roads her tired, footworn purlieu. An average rider could be there by dawn. On Phèdre, who likes to run, she’ll be there in two bells.

Theirs had been the portrait of an unhappy family. Eventually the rolling stone of community sentiment got to Thoris and his awe of hinterland Vita ground down into matrimonial salt. They fought like devils. He sent back her old aunts, threw out the ceramic statues of her pale, vacant-eyed goddess, and, owing to superstition, buried her more precious annular idols under the unforgiving cliffs of the Striped Hills. In return, she neglected his home, ruined his meals, and sequestered away into intimate company with the loom. Two decades, a thousand squabbles, a hundred tapestries and three children later she assumed her debt paid in full, a familial conclusion. But upon the plain, undecorated linens of the innkeeper’s wife Thoris quietly fathered several more.Once during one of their many fights she had asked her mother, how could you let him. Why didn’t you say something?Who would have listened?I don’t know, somebody? Anybody! Why didn’t anyone tell the innkeeper?What a day it will be when a child can mend the folly of his elders.Okay, well, why not his kids?Seventy-nine generations and you would have had words with mere babies?Mama, I’m serious. This’s burnin’ me up.Vita laughed. You think this is hot, she said, but where is your true fire?All that cryptic shit ain’t gonna shut me up this time, Mama, I’m pissed off. This ain’t right.What do you know of things that are right? All these books you read, all these Sharlayans. These sailors. You have been gone too long! Think, lambling. Do you really think you could have changed anything?Dragging her hands down her cheeks, she groaned, I don’t fuckin’ know.Then why even ask?Ariadne gritted her teeth. I'm your kid. Angrily thrusting out her hands, she cried, really drove it home: why do you tell me these fucked-up things at all?Cold, granite silence. She held up the image of her mother sitting upright at the table, her thick black braids shiny despite Little Ala Mhigo’s dust. Vita, the anachronism in an apron, never seemed to fit in anywhere, but now she stood even further apart from the other matrons bleakly staring out at their new home in Broken Water. In this sad hovel of displacement she seemed enigmatic, eerily powerful. A foreign antique.

Now she is close. The comet clings to the horizon, jogging along.“Solve this riddle,” she says as she daggers the bird along through the clay-thick dark. “A man’s mother is murdered. At her funeral, a beautiful woman he’s never before seen leaves a lily at her grave. He looks for her everywhere, but cannot find her. The next day, he murders his father. Why?”I don’t know, says the comet. Because he’s deranged?“He really just wants to see her again,” Ariadne replies, pulling a solenoid pistol from the pannier. She presses the cool metal barrel against her thigh. “Maybe another funeral will bring her back.”

You have too much seawater in you, Vita said once, and it was true. Saltwash swept her from Sharlayan back to La Noscea. In Vylbrand they were looking for swabs to join up under the blood-red banner, and when they heard she was an engineer who grew up on riverboats they practically begged her to put down her name.Then, the ship captain. Well, nevermind that one. Not one out of a thousand shooting stars could bully that one out of her, no matter how hard they tried. Anyway, when the whole mess was over, she lay flaccid ashore of her great gulf of failures and turned to drinking. Really drowning in it. What would make the taste of saltwater go away?Where did you learn to shoot like that? Adrian asked, one black howling night down in the oasis. They were having coconut wine and lizards roasted after a job with the U-tribe.The navy teaches you, she lied. Guess I just got good at it.Not that shooting. The liquor shooting.Oh, that.Rhalgr’s beard, other night you just about put Loras under the table.Here I thought you were actually gonna say something nice about my guns.Loras eyed her sullenly from his stone. I got a question about 'em, he said. He glanced at Adrian, who shook his head and then glanced at her too. Two pairs of gloomy brown eyes. Ari, is somethin' amiss?Nope. She took a big drink. Why, somethin' amiss with you?Well, the memorial, for one. Baba's memorial. Not sure how it is you came in three suns late to miss it, but had a leve in hand with just enough time left on it to loop us in and get us a share of the cut. And then that cut was just enough to pay for the liturgy. What's that about?I told you, the airship was late.By three suns?Sweat and tension stunk in the desert air around them. Gobbets of rich fat popped along the lizard's flank, but nobody was eating. They were watching her.Ari, said Loras, y'know, you’ve always been weird, but not like this. Something's wrong. He stared at her hard. You ain’t the same.Neither are you.Come on, now, what's wrong with you, Ariadne?Can think of a few things.I can think of exactly seven, muttered Adrian.Shut the fuck up. She glared death his way, knew he was about to start singing. His low voice already rumbling out in a laugh.O come ye way-ward bro-thers...She bolted up hot from the fire and that was the end of that conversation. Papers in hand, she left her gil-sore brothers and went home for a little while. Not that home truly existed. Imperials had squadroned through, torched the cottages, pulled apart the mills. Lambsrock was a breakwater ghost town. All she found sailing up and down the Velodyna were severed limbs.Didja ever recognize anyone? Gull asked, once when they were out on the beach. Like, any of the dead, y’know, had you gone an’ turned ‘em over. Anybody you knew?Ariadne shook her head. No. Everyone had left by then. Mostly it was soldiers and resistance fighters, guys who were holding out up in the hills.Poor bastards.You know, at first, I didn’t recognize anything. Whole place felt like a dream, some buried memory that wasn't mine. The river, the rocks, the trees... A few nights after I got there, this big storm cooked up, y’know? The dry kind, all levinclouds but nothing comes down?Yeah.Whole sky lit up like it was full of electric kelp. I'd forgotten storms could do that. Made myself sick over it. I don't want that, Gull, to have the things that matter to me fading. I'm sick of dreaming, but most of all I don't want anyone else's dreaming. If I'm gonna crash through this wretched fuck of a world, I want the blur to be my own.They went quiet. Ten brown bottles speared out of the sand between them, and the Rhotano winds blew up whistling from the shore. Warm, soapy waves washed up the sand and tickled their heels. Ariadne rubbed her neck and swatted away mosquitos. She felt strangely sober despite knowing she was plum drunk.Calendars and corpses, she thought, chronometers and death. Pounds of flesh measured in Imperial units. It crept up her shoulders like a wader in ice-cold water. The sennight before, the fortnight preceding, the itinerant’s moon, the migratory winter, the abattoir summer, and the spring of a thousand ghosts. She hunched over in the warm sand and started summing the immeasurable body count, scribbling visceral equations to solve the neverending calculus of blood, taxes, and time.Captain, O captain, of thy charisma we sing…Cold glass nudged her arm. Gull was prodding her with a bottle.Oy.What?You zoned out.Oh. She took the bottle and gulped. Sorry.Why sorry?She tapped the bottle bottom against her temple. Just keep thinking, she muttered, about how bad it’s been. All the places. All the things.Well, knock it off, mate. Don’t go there.Okay.Just stay here.Sand-grit encrusted her fingers. Often she would study her palms all cut-up and callused and think of what her parents’ hands must have looked like when they were her age, whether at thirty summers either of them ever looked past their misery and contemplated what was born of their daily work. The beauty and the calamity. Surely they never fretted about killing anyone. For all his thunderous temper her father died peacefully, a sanctimonious exile brought down by an attack of the heart. And maybe that was for the best. A relief, even. He’d never know his clever daughter turned out this way.Or that she got so much worse.

She’d come out of nowhere, that black-haired scrag. Popped him right off his wagon, rolled him over, left him for dead. The counterfeiter huddles under shelter of a red shale cliff and tries to consider his out beside a thin and expiring fire. By the grace of gods he is alive, but somewhere in the deep left lobe of his lung is lodged a bullet suffused with aether. His bronchioles are filling with a rising tide of fluid. Guffing and moaning, he rests his head against the rock. He’s been shot before, but never like this.He doesn’t want it back. None of them. Hells, he doesn’t even care about the wagon she blew up. She’d raided him, rambling the whole time a lunatic screed about shapes. Circles, fate, little floating threads. He was startled to find she had taken no coin. Only the idol was missing, and the burlap he’d wrapped it in. A piss-poor situation. Right now all he wants is a stiff drink and a fast ride to Ala Ghiri. If he can just get there and find the sawbones there’s hope for him, a chance of recuperation. The chirurgeon can extract a bullet, mend a lung, maybe even wholly heal him. A man can start over, and a trade can be prospected. Debts can be settled, consorted, shaken out …A heel strikes the back of his neck. With a yawp he rolls down shale and into his own campfire, flapping and writhing. His legs kick in the dust. Coals like orange baubles speckle his sleeves. He squawks in agony.She stands over him, a cowled phantom in goggles and ochre dust.“Mercy,” he gasps. “Ye already shot me, and I’m like to die.”“Not so fast.”“Please!”She kicks him in the ribs. Red, dizzying pain shoots through him and he spits up dark, smearing wads. A bodily bedlam.“You're here," she says, standing somewher near him, "and I've a question. Seeing that you are a dead man, so it does you no good to lie. Did anyone see you?”“Not a soul! I swear!”“Tell me where you got that thing.”“Wh-what thing.”“The statue. The Droplet idol. You wrapped it in a burlap bag. Where did you get it?""I-I don't know, I—got it off a woman at the Druthers. The Fane, she said she wanted a replica for the Fane—"Another hard kick. He curls shrimp-like, seizing. When he opens his eyes her round face hovers in front of him, dark eyes glistening with light from the ruined fire. That golden gearhead on her brow, like the diadem of a starry crown. He shuts his eyes and chokes. “Traders help me…”The gearhead spits. “They can't hear you. And nobody's coming. It’s just us and that drop of the deep blue sea. Now answer true. Who was this woman?""A-a healer? A soothsayer! H-how should I know, sh-she gave me gil and no name! That's how these things go!""Just gil? No name?" Her heel digs into his side, right where the bullet went in. "Did she wear embroidery? A dress, with white quilting? A woven shawl?""I told you all I know!"Softer, almost soothing, her voices drops to a murmur. Pain blurs his vision, but his ears flood with a low, raspy purr. She is down on the ground right next to him, her mouth by his ear. Cool metal at his nape."If you're true," she says, "I'll forgive you. I'll say a prayer for your soul and I'll take a message to your ilk.""No!""You were dead before I found you, know that? Imperials were on you. That's the end for a rat like you. Who you got, then, huh? A mother? Father?"The counterfeiter hollers. "I got a wife! I-I got children, lady, I got mouths to feed, I got people, I got kids, please don't kill me, please don't kill me, please don't kill me—!"The solenoid is loud. Its report has a raw, twangy sound to it, like a jawharp in a tin-walled room. But it hits him fast and painless, a gauss round rupturing the neck, the sternomastoid, the cervical vertebrae, the fleshy cord of spine and stem and spirit, all at once.

—and the curse of charisma, the curious clepe of the tow-headed captain of the towering Sovereign sailing serene as a around the sharkfin hook of the sweet Cieldalaes. Red sailor's osnaburg and the stink of barnacles ossifying under the white ocean sun. Bad food in her hands, unwashed bodies hammocking, and the breath of turpentine seething through the portholes like rotten teeth. But the captain, above them all—the kiss of his censure and the pleasure of his praise and the thrill of hearing his trilling cadence, tang of Vylbrand, tack of the saltwash, on that day he threw down the stay, rope coiled like a frayed snake on the sunswept deck as he said, take it. Get up here. Here's the rest of your life, Ariadne. Someday you'll sail her true. How she listened to him. How she believed him. "I don't. I don't trust 'im." Gull's voice, like a doomed prophet. "He has a devil in him, Miller, and it's got you in thrall." And the stars and the officer's gala and the white gloves and the lights and the roses, the backwater nowhere girl in satin river blue. One waltz. After that, anybody would adore him. Anybody would follow him, except Gull. Always Drowned Gull. Steel skies and cobalt seas and quick looks on the quarterdeck between bosun and bombardier and the ballbreaking black-haired beast of a Roegadyn bespoken of their albatross. She saw it all coming. Had them beat straight to quarters. The rout, the rigging, the cry of enemy sails. In the bowels of the Stella, the pistol leveled at his sandy brow. "Don't do this, I'm begging you, Captain. Think of your crew, Moss. Tobin. Think of me." His smile the final betrayal, the match and the powder magazine.Each time she kills him, the ship comes back together. Plank by plank, board by board, timber by pitch-laden timber. Never with her on it: she and Gull are always gone, blown to the ocean floor. But above her it still floats, leviathan and creaking. It is always the same ship; it is never the same ship. It is a shape of unending terminus, a dream within a dream."I remember," she says—each time, just before she pulls the trigger. "But you need to let me go."

She hikes to the falls. It's a long walk, but Phèdre is tired; she ties the bird to a beech and leaves her a surplus of turnips. Above, dawn is cracking pinkish-pale in the east, and a burst of starlings gibber past in a clump above the Dimwold oaks.The burlap lump, heavy in her hands. She walks twelve paces out to the edge of the overlook, high above the vast, impossible churn of the thundering falls. Untying the kudzu bindings takes time; she remains a sure hand with knots.Good luck, genius, says the comet, as sunrise devours it from sight.The cloth falls away. Morning light quickens on the ceramic. A rigid face of a pagan Nymeia stares up at her, feminine and dour, her grey eyes misty above a burgeoning sigh. Thick striped veils drape like ribbons from her lily-crowned brow. In her hands, a nebulous wheel, its purpose uncertain: it could wind flax or steer a ship, or neither, or both. And at her bare feet gnashes the circular crest of a wild, painted ocean. She straddles the points of a seven-pointed star.Tears well up in Ariadne's eyes, but she manages not to cry.O vitalic quandary. O maven of the cold. O idol of the hinterlands, benighted by dust and time, show this limniad lost in the greater torrent she has found something and yet nothing, having taken without giving, given without taking. Let her relish this small victory, before she goes cascading, maddening, barreling right off the violent, vainglorious edge."Thanks," she whispers, before throwing the idol as far as her arms can chunk it, down, down, into the roaring drop.

Character Art and Media

front page splash art by @fishp0le

Screenshots

Memes and Inspiration Prompts

Voice Reference (Anna Torv)

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⬩ Pacific Time Zone (PDT)
⬩ they/them; writer is 30+
⬩ frequently afkIf you're interested in writing with me and potential story involvement, feel free to send me a tell in-game! I'm looking to make new connections on this character and am open to many narrative routes. I am a selective, story- and development-driven writer with several years of experience in collaborative RP.While FFXIV contains fantastical themes/tropes that lean into contemporary parallels (e.g., xenophobia, racism and related stereotypes, class inequality, misogyny, and many others), I will not engage with players or groups whose OOC conduct, character design, or roleplay I find offensive, insensitive, or otherwise unpleasant.

CARRD CREDIT
Layout and design is mine.
Please do not copy or use any assets here unless you have received permission to do so!

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