hugtopia_logs | who falls

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who falls

♥ Who: Crystal Exarch and WHOEVS!
♥ Where: In the botanical garden
♥ When: Fourth week of September
♥ What: Someone's drowsy and doesn't yet know how to stop it.
♥ Rating: PG?

Given his limitations, it was only a matter of time. All too familiar with his own body and how it now worked, the absence of the Crystal Tower within the city was going to show itself on him eventually, and the Exarch was well aware of it. When the first signs appeared and hunger began to gnaw at his stomach, he did what he could to stave it off, eating full meals for the first time in years, but even that could only get him so far.

Well and truly, he belonged to the Tower now in exchange for his immortality. Without its strength, his own would begin to wane, and wane it did. Food kept his eyes open longer and longer for a time, but as the days passed and his movement became more and more sluggish, sustenance failed him little by little. It would come to a head, he knew, and sooner than he would have liked.

In the botanical gardens, it caught up with him. To anyone who happened to observe him, it would appear as though the Exarch was simply taking a very leisurely walk among the flora, enjoying the flowers. But then he stopped, pressed a hand to his forehead, caught in a sudden spell of dizziness. It passed in short time, as they had done before, but it was warning enough that he heeded well. A bench in a secluded area of the park, thankfully not far from where he was, served as a pleasant enough spot for him to lower his weary form down upon and sit, watching leaves sway in a breeze without seeing them at all.

Beneath the hood, eyes fluttered and breathing began to even out. Leaves scuttled along the path, playing a soft lullaby he couldn't quite ignore. Shortly after, fight it though he tried, the sounds of the wind, the calls of strange birds, and everything around soothed him to sleep.

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"The one good thing about looking old, which I suppose you never shall enjoy, in the state you're in," he says, "is that no one gets to tell you what to wear. If the aged Emperor wished to hold court in his nightwear, who was going to argue with him?"

He trails along behind the Exarch, for the most part, lazily speaking to the back of the hood, but for a moment as they turn a corner, he dances around, to be sure that the smaller man can see the smirk he wears.

"Especially when even in his sleepwear, said Emperor was sound enough of body to make those who thought his body failing in the twilight of his years regret voicing such a thought."

No, he thought, of course they wouldn't. And no, he thought behind it, he would never know the wear of time as he might have otherwise in a different life. For all it hadn't bothered him when he thought his days numbered either way, it did now, in some way that he couldn't explain.

"One in such a position for so long might also command a generous level of respect among his peers and followers, enough even to silence any question regarding his choice of clothing."

For all of his slouching posture and languid, almost sluggish movements, Emet had power enough to put stop to any question to his strength, from wherever it may come. A more logical, more mouthy part of his mind noted that as another point they had in common. For as much as the Exarch liked to insist on his age in factor, he still retained the body of his youth accented with the crystal hold of the Tower. The battle at Holminster Switch said as much whether or not he wanted it to.

All of this, he shut aside, continuing onward toward his apartment. The wanderings of a weary mind were truly far and wide.

"In Garlemald's court, respect and fear were often the same thing; where they were not, respect was always the more tenuous position."

It's a statement of pure fact. Irritating or even distressing as others might find it, that is precisely the way he built Garlemald to be. That empire is a war machine, designed to reward the bloodthirsty and inventive over the compassionate. There was a reason they had military rank where other nations might have had nobility.

The Exarch is indeed correct to view Emet-Selch's apparent laziness as disinclination, rather than any lack of ability. As languid as his movements might be, they have the intention behind them of someone who knows their body very well, and the disguised strength that that sort of bonelessness requires.

Indeed, it takes only a bit of logic to see it - Solus Galvus, the legatus as he was before he was Emperor, could hardly have used the Ascian's more than adequate magical ability on the battlefield.

"Unfortunately," he continues, "it takes many days of a stiff seat and a sore arse before one can develop such a reputation."

There is no passion in him for the Garleans, not those who stood in command or who were partial to their role with the lot, only because he himself had no heart for the mentality. But what he couldn't deny was that fear was, indeed, a powerful motivator on any side of the coin. Good men had done far worse under the wrong (or right, in another perspective) influences, and a good scare or the right threat might mean the difference between sensibility and insanity.

He'd seen it happen more often than he cared to recall. In his youth, before his slumber, after he awoke, in another world.

"Such is the rather unfortunate way of things." He walked on, tone having softened, and gave little further indicator of the shifts within his own heart. He may have been talking of the throne for all he would confess. "'Tis rather difficult to grow trees for their lumber upon rock and metal, or any crop, for that matter."

"I knew one who created such a plant, once," the Ascian observes idly. "Not a tree, but a vine, which sought out precious ores with its roots to grow its flowers. A passing whimsy, but it was beautiful as only impossible things can be."

His tone too, is soft, as though the fragment of an anecdote from Amaurot were not something he has spent centuries upon centuries guarding jealously as any hopeful for the Syndicate hoards their coin. Another forgotten thing that someone else now knows.

Is that the point of this, what he should be doing in this place? Putting every fragment of his knowledge into other people's heads, in the hope that some scrap of it might survive?

"When it exhausted all the ore to be found in the stone," he continues, "it withered and died. And so too do I expect that my last work shall be but a violent footnote on the pages of history, in the end."

That such a thing should exist touches him in a way both wonderful and horrible in the same light. He marveled - quietly, in his own mind, under the cowl where little gave him away - at the ability of something to survive so harsh a condition, to find a way to live no matter what. The parallels it struck plucked a gentle chord within him in that, one that turned to the darker in the same motion. In that same desperation, something precious had to be sacrificed, never to be seen again, if it had been at all.

How like the people he had once known, fighting each other tooth and nail to eek out a miserable life, that mythical plant. And yet something good had come of those efforts, hadn't it?

A few steps further found him at a junction in the roads, one he turned down on a route leading him to the apartments. A few blocks more and he would be at the start of them. To any who had transversed the likes of Eorzea and Yanxia or even the leavings of the First after the Flood on food, it would seem so short a distance. But to the Exarch, weary and doggedly carrying on with as much dignity as he could muster in his exhaustion, it seemed a small eternity.

"You are here, are you not? You yet exist in this world when your story in mine has all but ended." Here, yes. In his own memories. Perhaps not in Era's, as much as his world and hers had separated. "Our conflict does not exist here. You yourself have agreed to as much."

"It does not," he says, with a shrug. "But I am yet a casualty of it. Unless Elidibus should snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - which I might hope for but in practical terms, very much doubt - I've nowhere to return to. This existence is for me but a coda, an epilogue, and one that I have no doubt will be short by my reckoning."

In some things they have separated, but in others they remain much the same. And in that similarity is the end of Amaurot's keeper.

Perhaps that explains, then, why he is so very eager to talk, eager enough that he keeps pace even as the Exarch increasingly flags, offering neither help nor hindrance, only company.

If nothing, the talking is helping him to maintain awareness, not only to listen and to respond rather than merely putting one foot in front of the other and listening to his tired mind's scattered wanderings, but their source is a concern in and of itself. Even now, past knowing the Ascian will not take advantage of his sorry state, he cannot help a wariness, and alertness as to the man's place around him, the line of their conversation.

He could and would still turn his back on the man if circumstances were right, but he did just wake up to find Emet sitting - sleeping - right beside him on a bench, closer than was in his comfort.

"I have no doubt that it may, should we find a way to save this world. How many lifetimes, how many generations have you seen rise and fall before your ageless eyes?"

Just as well, the Exarch continued on under his own steam. He had suffered worse and would continue to suffer again in the days to come. Of that much, he was certain, but it was hardly the least of his concerns. Once he had bundled down on his bed properly and taken a good, long rest, he would be at his research again as if nothing of the sort had happened.

As long as he's willing to keep responding and being interested, Emet-Selch will keep talking. He has had so very few people to talk to over the centuries, after all.

"I stopped attempting to number the lifetimes after Allag, perhaps even before," he says. "It became as meaningless as counting fish in the oceans. Even were I to count in kingdoms, the numbers would be higher than most are capable of understanding."

He has noticed the effort, the way the other man's pace slows, but does not comment on it, merely adjusting his own. He can well imagine the droop of ears beneath the hood, now that he's seen the face beneath once.

"You may find yourself thinking the same, given time," he says. "After all, with your plot to sacrifice yourself foiled, you've nothing but time, now."

He had been well aware of the consequences of joining himself with the Tower, though he had not expected to survive the full extent of the plot he and the Ironworks had set into motion. A century of awareness longer than his mere twenty-four years of age, barring the two hundred he slept away, had been a daunting task to himself, though he was not alone.

In truth, he could not blame Emet for recreating a city that he had once known, people he had once loved. To be left alone for so long would have driven anyone mad. Despite having lived through the horrors that were the Seventh and then the Eighth Umbral Calamities and what it did to him and his worlds, he felt for the man. It was strange, that empathy. Not enough to sway him, but strange all the same.

"Time is all we ever truly have. I do not expect I should see the number of years, of generations, of civilizations that you have, but we do not know. None can predict a future, only hope to shape it."

"True enough," he agrees. "Even memories fade - if not in the weakening of the flesh, then in the immaterial recycling of the soul. Even time can strip them away, as it wears away all things."

And surely that too is experience, from a man who has forgotten more than even the most vaulted of scholars might ever know.

"One learns to see patterns, over time," he says, this time in disagreement. "Nothing can be predicted with certainty, save that time takes all in the end. But the general shape of history is not unlike the weather - it will not rain without clouds except in the most exceptional circumstances, nor will it snow in summer. In a similar way, one can be confident that a headless empire will collapse and an oppressed people someday throw off their yoke, but not when that might happen, or what will remain among the ruins."

They are getting closer, surely, step by step, bit by agonizing bit, and the corner that will lead them to the residences is within sight. How tempting it is just to stop by one of the benches along the side of the road and take another brief rest, but if he stops now, it might be another hour or three before he can make himself wake and stand again to continue on to his soft bed and softer sheets.

It's a point he focuses on, almost as much as the man traveling with him. At the same time, he can't help but wonder why Emet follows him so. Surely there must be other people in the city and other vices the Ascian might find than a tired miqo'te trudging with as much grace as he can back home.

"I suppose. History tends to repeat itself, however vaguely, should one not learn from mistakes. The same is also true of such events, great and small. But the turn of the seasons and what determines how one war will end are not quite the same. Best not to press too much influence, perhaps."

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