EORZEA NOIR

I don’t often visit my parents’ graves. I decided early on that my mother is where she ought to be, which is to say she’s by my father’s side, and it’s likely best I don’t disturb that peace. They wouldn’t want to hear about my troubles anyway, even from six fulms down, and I think I can still effectively emulate anything they’d have to say in response. You’re getting lazy, you aren’t pushing yourself, you’re full of excuses, you don’t want to change, you just need more discipline, you’re too arrogant, you’re not enough. Would they even be wrong to accuse me?

Every now and then, however, I get a wild notion that maybe if I go take a seat between their headstones and talk about where my life is headed or the things I’ve accomplished, things might be different. I might feel some vague sign of approval. A slightly cooler breeze on my face, a moment where the sun beating down feels less oppressive. Anything, I’ll take anything, even if it’s all just a trick of the mind. I’m a grown woman, but it hardly matters. I could use the encouragement now more than ever.

It was by pure chance that I had this very idea today, this morning, just after sunrise. I pulled on my boots and not thirty fulms inside Ul’dah, I ran smack into a Brass Blades chaplain I’ve vaguely known for a good ten years. It started out as a compliment I haven’t heard since well before I started drinking:

“Elia, is that you? You look great!”

Of all the things I am, great seems to be a far distance from it. What fucking right did this guy have to tell me that? The audacity of this arsehole to look past my sleepless nights, the nausea, the gods-forsaken headaches and tell me I look great. Doesn’t he know how hard this is? Doesn’t he know…

Oh. Shit. I’m in recovery. I haven’t had a drink in awhile. Do I really look great now?

Fifteen minutes later, he says, “Do you want to get some coffee?”

Thirty minutes later, “Do you know what I do besides give sermons?”

An hour later, “Do you want to talk about it?”

I never made it out to see the graves. Might be for the best.

I’ve spent the last six hours wishing for death and I’ve got no one to blame but myself.

I heard about this elixir that some people use as a last resort to quit drinking and Sabrys was kind enough to give me several vials for nothing. If you take some and then try to drink, you’ll wind up…well, spending six hours wishing for death with no one to blame but yourself. So that’s where I am.

In spite of the agony, I’m learning every day what makes me want to drink, some things less obvious than others and some things exactly what I expected. Sometimes it’s just pure habit, like waking up with the sun. Tonight, it was needing to tell a mother her only son is dead and watching the light leave her eyes.

She was worried for him and she had every right to be. The boy was off playing with gangs in the desert, getting in over his head with young men who gave him a place to belong and a direction for his anger. I tailed him over the course of a week or so and I can see just how unremarkable this tragedy is in the grand scheme of things. He lived with his mother and they barely scraped by in the city. He worked hard labor at the quarry and probably fell in with a gang after he saw a vision of how powerful it could make him feel, a kind of power he couldn’t find elsewhere. And then someone took advantage of another young hireling in a countless and worthless string of many and got him killed. Same story as it ever was, same story that it will always be.

The only atypical part of this is how exactly he got snuffed and I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the details. There’s something supposedly being sold out of Lost Hope called Basilisk. When I found the boy at the arranged meetup with a rival gang, they were all turned to stone. It’s the damnedest thing. I’ve never seen anything like it. The moment was captured perfectly in time, right down to the smirk on Ed’s face as he opened the can. He couldn’t have known, right?

So where does that leave me? For now, it leaves me a pale, clammy mess that can’t get out of bed. But as soon as my body comes back to me after this bout of foolishness that I’m not about to forget anytime soon, I need to talk to Sabrys. Can you imagine this kind of weapon in the wrong hands?

The temple was dim and quiet, all stone and candlelight in the same unchanging way it’d always been. From the day I set foot there, I quietly understood the way it was made, the intent of its design. It was far more intimate than any sanctum I’d set foot in, felt more human, closer to being the intersection of heaven and earth the priests of the Twelve had often described but rarely evoked. I’ve been in the temple a hundred times before and resisted. I’ve always been skeptical, but I think maybe a little faith wouldn’t kill me.

Guilt was eating me alive the same way it always did, from the inside out starting right in the pit of my stomach. I was hiding my drinking again, stealing away when I felt the pressure creep in to curb it before it got too high to deal with. I knew it was wrong, that I was breaking trust, and hoped desperately to be caught in the act because I was too fucking craven to come out and admit it. It finally happened.

I was sure I was going to walk back out of those doors with a back full of angry lashes and the knowledge that the cycle would continue, absolutely convinced that it was all a fairly-earned price to pay for the vices I can’t control. But it didn’t work like that. Call it obvious, but I’m always surprised when I least expect it.

I cried like a baby and admitted my weaknesses, the things I’m afraid of. I confessed to the shame and the way I squander my time and talent. I cried more. I waited for the blows to come and they never did. I felt raw and open, uncomfortable and disgusted and humiliated. And despite my best efforts to make myself as easy for other people to hate me as I hate me, somehow it never happened. I felt nothing but awe when what I got instead was acceptance.

I keep trying to write here about something good, and it’s not that every moment is misery. I’m just not a poet or someone who pens love letters, and even in the privacy of a page I still get too embarrassed to be vulnerable. But the importance of this unexpected moment of feeling profoundly loved and understood is one I can’t shake. I really want to be okay.

Adolfo Arranz

I wake clutching a twisted pillow in an empty bed with the dull drumbeat of bitter need pounding in my head. Disgust makes me nauseous, or maybe it’s the want for a drink, or maybe it’s both—I can’t even fucking tell anymore, and one is indistinguishable from the other so why even try to look for a divide? But strangely enough, that feels like the least of my problems right now.

Here’s the truth of it. I’ve decided to quit investigating for awhile and get my head together. I had a full collapse last night after the arrest I’ve been pining after slipped out of my fingers again, probably for the very last time, at the same fucking orchestrations that always undermine me. I’m struggling to feel the point of anything I do. Inquiry without power is…what, exactly? I’m just some kid with an older brother that dangles what I want just out of reach while I jump and occasionally brush my fingers against it. Maybe the prize isn’t worth the effort.

Instead of moping, I’m leaving for Doma before the others and I’m thinking maybe I’ll stay for awhile. Throw myself into something tangible, something actually fucking real that I can see for myself. From the look of things, they need the help, and I need them to need me. I need to remember what compassion feels like. Maybe I can help rebuild or…I don’t even care. I’ll hand out rations. I’ll fix wagons. I’ll hold crying babies. It doesn’t matter. I jotted down a few things Michishio said about the culture there, so maybe I have a chance.

Frederick Judd Waugh

With so much anger boiling around me, it feels strange and pretty godsdamned refreshing to be one of the few steady anchors in a veritable shitstorm. I traveled to Kugane alone and spent a good portion of the trip listening to the conversations around me, doing my best to learn how to blend in with the walls while I’m here. I don’t know if I gleaned any particularly useful wisdom, but I do know far too much about a specific fisherman in Kugane who overcharges for his stock.

From this distance, some might feel like their troubles are far behind them, left back in Eorzea. As for me, I’m washing the taste of eastern liquor out of my mouth before I have company and I know I still carry the same burdens in a different skin. I’m not fixed by any means, but unlike all the others who are in an uproar over the Ward’s ownership transfer, I feel like this is a second…third…fourth chance for me. New faces, new impressions to make, and it seems that there will be new people for me to try to help and serve. I haven’t admitted it aloud to anyone, but that last point has lit a bigger fire than I anticipated. A familiar ember I had nearly forgotten.

I have no connection to the land, no special affinity for Domans or sensitivity to their struggles. More likely than not, I’ve complained about their distant cousins when they sought refugee in Ul’dah at the height of the war, got impatient and prodded them along with my cudgel once or twice on my shift. I have no delusion of my overwhelming goodness or selflessness on matters of their freedom or safety, and yet I’m eager to put myself on the ground and rebuild. But I don’t have to carry the corruption of the Blades with me into my grave.

I wonder if my father ever struggled to love the people he served even as it was never really returned to him. If he ever had days that I had, pouring sweat in the Thanalan sun and just wishing for all the tents full of people who were suddenly my problem to just up and vanish—not my problem anymore. Those days will come back to me sooner than I’d like and I know I just have to be the wheel on the cart, just like my mother taught me. There may be three others like me and no thanks for the effort, but without me, nothing above would move as it should. This is my purpose.