a/n: This story is brought to you by double entendres, the enduring question of viera sexuality, and lots of Björk. Enjoy. :)
The Dust Forest
In a forest pitch dark/glowed the tiniest spark/it burst into a flame
Fran takes the Wood's seed in her mouth and swallows.
To ignore the taste, she imagines it travelling down to her stomach and growing heavy. She waits. For a moment, she thinks she can feel it. Then she realizes she is behaving foolishly. Her ears flicker, searching for a change, a real change, not an imagined one, but none comes.
She examines the fruit in her hand. It stains her hand red with its juices; they were not worth the stain. She'd never tasted something so sharply bitter; not even the bitterest healing herbs could compare. She feels something stirring in her stomach, but it is nothing good. It tastes like a wound… no, more like a knock to the head. She has never experienced such internal discomfort.
She expected something else, but what could she have hoped for? Her sisters say the same of their Eves – that the fruit was tart and unpleasant. According to legends of old, the fruit used to be round and sweet. Lente grew large with child after eating the fruit, and gave birth to three daughters who each gave birth to three more. But Lente's time is past; the last woman to eat the Wood's seed and give birth died many years ago.
She was an elder to the village, a wise leader by the standards of her kin. Fran remembers that viera's death well: she was fragile, hair thinned and skin wrinkled. She lay on a bough all day, every day, leading up to her death, speaking little. Fran would attempt talk with little success. When they no longer heard her heart beating, they simply left her for the Wood to claim, as was their custom. She had done them a humble service in retiring to the Wood for her death.
The blossom of that viera's final seed was Mjrn. Mjrn was now preparing her apprenticeship. Many years had passed since then.
Fran does not know what to do with the fruit. Having tasted it, and having found it bitter, she knows she does not want it any longer.
She feels a strange stirring in her stomach, one that defies nature itself. No sooner is her mouth open in a gasp of surprise than do fruit and seed swell out to spew across the mossy Wood ground. She stares at the waste in shock.
Delicately, so as not to offend the Wood, she places the fruit on the ground and covers it with some leaves. She feels deceitful. Her ears twitch, and she catches a snippet of the Wood's disappointment. She thinks, though, that it is not with her, but with everything.
I am sorrowful, as well.
She curls under the Wood's boughs, feels the life in the tree that she leans against. She reaches one hand to her belly. She feels the trace of her sharp fingernails against her skin, the fragrance of the Wood's flowers, the birdsong high above, the reassuring sliver of Mist running underneath it all. She does not feel a child growing in her womb.
She closes her eyes.
In a time before your mother and her mother before her, the viera thrived. Even then, we lived in solitude, choosing the ways of the Wood over the ways of warfare.
In those days, the Wood breathed with ease. Its creatures were kind and cooperative. There was sunlight and warmth for all her children.
Slowly, the Beyond stirred.
Slowly, the Beyond changed.
"How passed your Eve?"
Fran looks up at her sister, who stands in the lodging's doorway. The runes on the frame wished those who passed under it tranquility, strength, long years, and, Wood willing, a child. It sheltered another before Fran, and will shelter another after. It will bear its weathered wishes forever.
"As could be expected." The light catches on the teardrop at her sister's neck. The orange jewel glitters like the fire it recalls. Fran thinks of that fire, and of a similar piece of hume glass that she found in the forest as a child. Fran looks back up at her sister. She wonders why the Wood did not tell her sooner. "Moira has passed?"
Jöte casts her gaze down. Her hand clutches around the pendant. "Yes," she says, "with the night. Did the Wood not speak to you of her?"
"No," Fran answers honestly, though she is troubled by the thought. She tries to hide it. "I slumbered."
"Perhaps she sang to you in your dreams." Jöte offers Fran a small smile. She is weary, Fran sees as much. The passing of a Guardian and with it, the passing on of one of Lente's tears. It is significant. Fran was very young when the previous Guardian passed into the Wood, but she remembers the solemnity. She does not remember when she first learned the story of the tears, or even who passed it on to her. Only the story itself, one of flame and love.
She can recite it, as can all viera who have been young. She knows it as well as she knows herself. It is inside her like the rest of her life, and, though her stomach lurches at the thought of that story, bloody and awful, she knows she cannot reject it.
The humes trespassed on the forest. They killed and flayed the creatures for sport. One day, they killed a viera for sport. Though the viera had no concept of such an act at the time, they also violated her womb. Her body was discovered mutilated – ears cut - and hung upon a bough. She had ventured to the fringes of the Wood, thinking them safe, despite her sisters' warnings. This is why young viera must never venture to the corners of the Wood: they are no longer safe.
When Fran finds the hume body in the Wood, she first feels a pang of revulsion.
This is partially because it was his scent that gave him away, the thick, pervasive smell of rotting flesh. She brushes aside a thick, flat leaf - the jungle grows quickly over the nutrient-rich dead - and takes a good look at him. Half his face is a congealed mess, the meal of an animal likely distracted by fresher game. His eyes and mouth lie open carelessly, in a way that only heightens Fran's disgust. She crouches next to the body, looking at it through her black, wrought-iron mask.
Without realizing, she reaches out to touch his clothes. They feel different from hers, even when she still wore soft, plant fabrics as a child. There is something shining around his rotting neck. Her long nails catch on a bit of the rotting flesh as she slips it from under his shirt: an amulet. She turns it over. Hume writing. She cannot understand it.
She checks his other possessions. Viera do not loot. Fran is not looting, but what she is doing – looking - is worse. She finds that his canteen is empty. He must have died of thirst, or exhaustion. Maybe starvation. Fran has never been hungry before, not really. She wonders what it is like.
When a viera finds a hume in the forest, it is said that she may cut his ears off for her sisters to keep as a trophy. Fran does not want to cut this poor man's ears off. The vague, glassy horror in him makes it an unappealing thought.
Fran leaves the body without mention, the hume ears intact.
The viera spoke to the Wood, pleaded for the Wood to deny these intruders. The Wood did not reply, but she listened.
Fran knows a viera who can no longer listen.
She used to be a salve-maker, quick and clever. But even a salve maker, alone in the jungle, cannot combat an armed party of humes.
When they asked her what she did – if she tried to escape – she says:
"I hid."
Like a rabbit, they mocked when they found her. They took her ears – but nothing else, she assures them. Such men – with accents from the north, explorers by trade, rich with pistols and other costly playthings – would not want relations with an animal. They cut off her ears, instead, for a trophy. After much prodding, she revealed (with shame) that, from what she garnered from the men's talk amongst themselves, they planned to preserve them and hang them in something called a parlor.
What an outrage, her sisters cried. Fran could feel the hate boiling in her, too. We do nothing so base. We would never hang their ears on our walls – we bury them when we take them, for the Wood.
We should not take their ears, sister, said Moira. She was not yet a Guardian, then. We should take their hearts. They value them as we value our ears. They think of them as their connection to one another. Moira knew this of hume culture because the Wood shared its secrets with her, those that the wind picked up from distant plains. As our ears are our connection to the Wood.
Even Jöte, serious even back then, cracked a grim smile.
They viera fought well, but fell fast and hard. It lasted many days. On the slow days, the hume soldiers raped hostaged viera as though they were defenseless hume women, and not enemy warriors. The viera spat in their eyes.
When it became clear that he had all but lost the battle, the hume leader, corrupted by bitter, hume jealousy, set the Wood aflame. The other humes, infected, followed suit. The viera perished. Having had their way with it, the humes no longer wanted the Wood, and they left its ashen remains behind, much as they had left behind the first murdered viera.
The few viera who remained could not speak for the pain. It was not only in their being, but in their ears: the death cries of the wood. One child, in particular, cried in silence; an older viera wiped the tears from her face.
"Do you desire a child?"
Usually such questions are left unsaid. Jöte inclines her head toward her sister. Fran can detect the question in her eyes, but her sister, of her few words, only says, "It matters not what I desire. It is as the Wood wills."
Fran considers. A child is a great blessing, but one can hardly claim ownership for it. She remembers her own (and Jöte's) mother, and how little they ever knew her. How little she knows.
She asks Mjrn the question later.
"Truly," her sister says. Her cautious tone only barely manages to hide her excitement at the notion. "I would love a child." Mjrn smiles. "We have never had one, but I believe it would be good for the village."
But it would not be yours, Fran thinks. You want it to be yours, but it would not be.
Then: I do not want a child, Fran thinks, and she surprises herself with the decision. She realizes that her life until now has been a waking dream.
When she had finished shedding tears, this young viera left the group, resolutely walking to the charred tree of old and plucked from it a fruit. She sliced it open with her nails to reveal the seeds, and she brought them back to the group. She flung them into the destroyed earth.
"What folly is this?" the last Guardian asked her. "Why do you do this? Do you not realize that all is hopeless?"
"No," she said, "There is still hope for the children of the Wood."
She was only a child, and her words sounded like those of a fool. The viera ignored her, and wept until they could weep no more, eventually slumping into sleep on the ashes of their sisters' graves.
When they awoke, all around them were trees. There was sunlight. The viera dried their wet, dirty faces and stood, looking in awe around them.
Fran looks around her. The emptiness makes her skin crawl.
She can see the sky. Not just the glimmer of dusky sunlight, but the harsh, open blue. She can see the world: a flat expanse that rolls on to the edges of Ivalice. Fran feels faint.
She had taken off her iron mask in the wood and buried it near an old corpse, underneath a little copse, that seems eerily familiar to her.
Now the rest of her black iron seems heavy and stark in the bright world. She feels she'll sink in this expanse of great blue sky.
"What is this?" they asked.
The girl replied:
"It has grown anew, as the Wood has willed."
"I do not know you, child," the elder said. "What is your name?"
"Lente," she said.
"Who's this Lente?"
"The Mother," Fran says, trying to find the right hume word as she weaves her way through the crowd. One man's flesh brushes her. She can smell the trace of his sweat. Everything about him smells foreign.
The man who asked the question, paunchy but without a wandering eye, nods pensively and somehow evades the tangle of others' feet. He is skillful in his work, which is why Fran will help him to capture some treasure in Nalbina, near Verdpale Palace.
"Your goddess?"
She doesn't understand why she would tell any part of her people's story to an outsider, but she finds that it relieves her. Like allowing a wound to bleed out its poison.
"No," she says. "She is one of us."
The viera grew still.
A wind whipped. No sooner did the viera hear the rustling of new leaves than did Lente disappear with the wind.
In her wake, one of the viera felt a new weight in her hand. In her fist, she found a handful of teardrop gems, the color of a dying ember, warm to the touch. She realized that it was the hand with which she had wiped the young viera's tears away, and realized that the being before her truly had been the Mother.
When Fran sees, years later, the destruction where Verdpale once was, she finds her eyes prickling.
There is no Mother for them. No tale to tell. No lies left.
Just destruction, the hand of humes.
A new hume, this time, one as still at the stillness as she. They creep farther and farther, appalled at the mauled landscape.
"We should go. Nothing left but ashes here," he says, his accent lilting. He suddenly lets out a strange laugh, reminded of something. "I worry for the princess."
She turns to him, hoping for something she cannot put into words. She is stunned to see that his face communicates, so clearly, what she wants to say.
She has never felt words like this before.
"You must think us brutes." His words flow, an extension of his grief.
"You are not responsible," she says. She doesn't understand why humes apologize for those things that they have no control over. Perhaps to apologize for not having control.
He looks up at her. Something comes between them, appearing in his eyes. "Right," he says, his expression wavering, "So you don't believe in sins of the father, all that rot?"
"I know not of what you speak."
He stares at the ruin. "I know something of your kind. You believe that every hume is a monster."
She stares at the man before her, young and supple and so full of feeling. "You are not a monster," she says slowly, "I cannot believe that."
The Wood around the viera grew serene as the old Wood had, but the surrounding Wood grew dark and hateful with the deeds of the humes. The air there pulsed with the humidity of fires long ago, and the bizarre trees grew so thick that sunlight could barely reach the dark earth. Strange beasts soon populated it. Although it was danger to the viera, it was moreso for the humes.
"And this?"
"My home," he explained, running a ringed hand over the dashboard. The controls and buttons beamed up at him. "My lover, my child, my life. My Strahl."
Fran cocked her head to the side. The entire ship gleamed, and, although it was but metal, Fran thought she could feel something breathing. Perhaps because it smells of him, a vague scent she's yet to pinpoint, something warm and mesmerizing.
"And that-" he nodded his head toward a door, forever too polite to point "-is your room."
"Mine?"
Now, when a hume traveler passes, he is unlikely to escape with his head, much less his monkey-ears. A hume is better dead than alive. There is no love lost between our kinds, child.
Fran cannot meet his eyes at first; only trails her fingers up his fine blouse.
His fingers feel firm and sure, until they meet her ears. They become reticent, ginger, but she trails her nails over his neck and he breathes and leans in closer.
He leans in and kisses her softly, tip-toeing to reach her lips. She can smell his perfume, him, spring-green and sweet and new, full of hope and life and warmth.
For the first time in a long time, she breathes in the Wood.