Author's Note: I'm pleased to see people have been guessing on the right track! I mentioned a while back that Lydian's father was a solider. But I dropped the first real clue right before Lydian got snatched up on the terrace in Bhujerba. I enjoyed writing this chapter. I hope you enjoy reading it!
Ash: No need to be driven mad. Here's an update to help you keep your sanity!
The young man in the drawing was handsome. And he was familiar. I'd seen that face every day for weeks. There really was no mistaking it the longer I looked at it. Basch fon Ronsenburg was captured there within the plane of that drawing.
I'd long since forgotten what in the world it was I'd been looking for in my closet, but I wasn't so scattered that I forgot to finish picking up my mom's stuff and put it back where it'd fallen from. Only the ribbon and the drawing were left out. And out they would stay. They were going with me and I was going to the palace.
The quickest way to find out the answer to my question would be to ask it, right? And I certainly couldn't ask my mom. I'd looked through the rest of the papers when I picked them up. I'd hoped to find a letter or something, anything that would spell out in no uncertain terms what I was dealing with here. Nothing else was there, though, that had anything to do with Basch.
I carefully folded the picture back up and tied the ribbon around it and stuck it under my arm. I locked my door behind me and made the walk I'd gotten used to. Part of me was a little scared of what I'd find out. Maybe whatever it was, I didn't want to know. But I was curious. What did Basch know? He'd stared at me so intently when we first met. Was he thinking about my mom, then? Was he thinking about a girl he used to know? I'd introduced myself to Queen Ashelia as Lydian Noah Quinnas. Quinnas was my mom's last name. Maybe that'd struck a chord as well.
I had an idea in my head as I entered the palace walls, a theory. And now things made sense. Basch had seemed so familiar to me when I first met him even though I'd never seen him a day in my life. And for some reason, I'd always felt a strange urge to gain his approval and make him proud. There were things my mom had never talked to me about. I'd asked questions, but she'd always get this sad look on her face and say she wasn't ready to talk about it yet. I'd known the basics of the story, but she'd still held out on all the details.
Someday, she'd always promised. But we'd run out of time and she'd never gotten the chance to be ready enough to talk to me about it. When she died, I'd thought that this was something I'd have to resign myself to never knowing. The full story. I'd had to make myself accept that there were just some answers I wouldn't get. Now, though, there was a chance such a thing wouldn't be the case. Maybe there were still some things I had a chance of knowing.
My thoughts flew to Larsa. What would he say if I asked him about this? What would his opinion be? Would he say that I was just jumping to conclusions? Or would he say that my thoughts made sense? And then when I thought about Larsa, I thought that all I was doing right now was wasting time when I should be focusing on what was about to go down in just a couple of days.
Basch was busy and he wasn't in the palace. I didn't want to get in his way. And I didn't want to stalk him all over Rabanastre. That would be creepy. So I sat down and I waited. I wanted answers, but I didn't want to cause him some kind of inconvenience. When I finally saw him walking down the hall, I started having second thoughts. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this. Maybe I should just turn around right now and go back to the safety and comfort of my home. I could put the picture back in the closet and bury it back among my mother's possessions. I couldn't do that, though. That wasn't even remotely an option. Now that I'd seen this, I couldn't unsee it. Not knowing would haunt me forever.
He was just about to open his mouth and say something. He was probably going to ask me what I was doing there or why I looked like I'd seen a ghost or something. I didn't give him a chance to, though. I thrust the drawing into his hands and took a couple of steps back.
"What is the meaning of this?" he asked confusedly as he looked down at the paper and ribbon in his hands.
"That's what I want to know," I told him quietly. "My mom. . .she died back during the battle over Rabanastre. What you're holding is a picture she drew."
"I know not the significance of it to me," he said as he started pulling at the ribbon.
"It was always just the two of us. Just my mom and me," I told him. The words just kept coming and now that I'd started I couldn't stop them. I couldn't hold them in. "There were things she never told me about. Umm. . .things, maybe, you can? Like. . ."
"This is. . ." he said quietly as he unfolded the picture and stared at it.
"Basch are. . .are you. . .?" I swallowed the lump that had suddenly formed in my throat. I practically had to choke my big question out. "Are you my father?"
The silence that followed was massive. And it was strangely deafening. The moments stretched by and seemed to last forever. He stared at the drawing and then stared at me. He even opened and closed his mouth a couple of times and that would have been funny to me if the situation weren't so serious. He closed his mouth and finally settled his eyes on me. He stared at me even more intently than he had the first time. I had no idea what he was searching for, just like before, but he seemed to have finally found it.
"Lydian Noah Quinnas," he finally spoke. "I'm sorry, but I am not your father."
"B-But that picture," I insisted. I couldn't have been wrong, right? Otherwise, why would my mom have drawn a picture of him? "It looks just like you. And my mom told me that my father was a solider. And you're. . ."
"The man in the drawing is not I, Lydian. 'Tis of another man long since dead. He went to his grave with concern much like your own. His thoughts were on Lord Larsa," he said solemnly.
He was dead. Dead. "Who is he?" I asked somewhat reluctantly. I was in too far to back out now, though.
"He was a Judge Magister of Archadia. He reached the highest rank possible within Archadia's military," he explained to me. "To many, he was known as Gabranth."
"Gabranth," I repeated with a thoughtful frown. It didn't sound remotely familiar to me. My mom had never talked about anybody with that name.
"There is another name, though, the name he was given at birth," Basch told me. "Noah fon Ronsenburg."
"Noah. Noah?" Noah was my middle name.
"Aye. Noah fon Ronsenburg was my twin brother. When I met you, there was something that struck me. It was there in your face, yet I knew not what it was. I now know. The color of your eyes and the shape of your face. A resemblance of sorts." He took a breath and handed back the drawing. "My brother, I suspect, was your father."
Noah fon Ronsenburg. Basch's twin brother was my father. That made Basch my uncle. So. . .I wasn't alone in the world? I had one piece of family left out there. Well, not out there. He was right in front of me. I had so many questions. I had questions I'd thought about for years and I had questions that were newly formed. He answered all that he could. There were times when I could tell he wanted to hold things back. That was when he was telling me the worst of my father's history.
That information was hard to come to terms with, but I tried to take it all in stride. My uncle had forgiven him and made peace with him despite everything that had happened. If he could forgive him then it was not my place to judge a man whose shoes I would never be able to walk a mile in. In the end, though, my father died an honorable death. And he died with the wish that Larsa would be kept safe. My father knew that Larsa had been the key to peace then. And I knew he was the key to peace now.
My uncle also told me about a place called Landis, which had been invaded by the empire and no longer existed. He told me many things, but there were also things he couldn't tell me. I didn't know how my parents had met. I didn't know how long they were together. I didn't know what had been the cause of their separation, which had definitely broken my mother's heart. If they'd stayed together long enough and he'd known she was pregnant with me, would he have stayed and raised me? Or would he at least have maintained some kind of involvement in his daughter's life? Those were all things I'd never know and that was something I'd have to live with. At least there was something I did know now. I was Lydian Noah Quinnas and for better or worse, I was the daughter of Noah fon Ronsenburg.
As for the ribbon, I supposed my father must have given that to my mother at some point. Why else would she tie it around a picture she'd so carefully folded and put away? The ribbon was something I decided to keep with me from that point onward. I tied it around my wrist.
It hadn't been easy facing Vaan and Queen Ashelia after that either considering my father was the reason they'd lost loved ones. I went and told them straight out, though, what I'd found out about my lineage. They deserved to know and I didn't want to keep it from them. They held nothing against me, though. They'd said something along the lines of me being my own person and that my father's actions were separate from my own.
When the big day finally arrived, the day we would execute our plan to save Larsa from execution, I felt anxious. And I felt nervous. And I felt worried. And despite all that, I felt ready. This was it. It was do or die time, quite literally. The perks of having an uncle who had once impersonated your dead father who'd been a Judge Magister was that he could get back into Archades without raising too much suspicion. It also helped that Balthier was actually from Archades and was a crafty guy in addition to that. It reminded me of what I'd told Larsa all that time ago when we were trying to get out of Rabanastre. It was all about connections.
A part of me had wished that Vaan would decide to stay behind in Rabanastre. It's not that I didn't want his help. It's that with Penelo so close to her due date, it would probably be best for him to be there with her. Also, anything could happen in Archades. Anything. And that included the possibility that Vaan might not make it back. The last thing I wanted was for their innocent child to be put in the position of never knowing his or her father.
Vaan and Penelo knew what it was like, though, to go into a dangerous situation. They also knew what it was like to lack parents. They both knew what Vaan was getting into and so that was why I made sure to keep my mouth shut and stay out of it. Besides that, Vaan was no weakling at all. He could handle himself. I believed that. As I watched them say goodbye to each other, I hoped that it would not be the last time. To not be able to see the person you were in love with again. . .That made me think about Larsa. Sure it was a one-sided unrequited love and all, but I hoped that the last time I'd seen him alive and well wouldn't be the last time ever. I couldn't even entertain the possibility of such a scenario in my mind.
"The hour is upon us," Fran said as she appeared behind me. "We must make haste."
She was right. It was time. Esabel put the bag that had the nethicite in it into my hand and then laid her hand over it. She has handing it over to me after I'd put it in her care. I wasn't sure why she was doing that. She was more than capable of keeping it safe. Still, I accepted the responsibility and took the string that kept the bag closed. It was long enough to put over my head and around my neck. I stuffed the bag down the front of my shirt and vowed to keep it safe at all costs.
We finished saying our goodbyes to those who were staying behind. Lady Ashe would be staying behind because. . .well she was the queen and she couldn't afford to jeopardize the future of Dalmasca even if she'd rather be right there beside us helping. And Penelo would be staying behind with the queen for obvious reasons.
That left the rest of us heading off to Archades. My uncle showed up with a fresh haircut and in armor I'd never seen before. I did a double take. Like that, he looked even more like the man in the drawing than before. My father. . .So that was what Judge Magister Gabranth would look like, huh?
"Lydian, hurry it up would you?" Balthier said in his no-nonsense kind of way as he snapped my mind back to what it was supposed to be on. I hurried behind the others and we boarded the Strahl. Well, most of us boarded the Strahl. Basch had arranged his own mode of transportation. He'd be entering Archades under the guise of Gabranth and as such, that meant he'd have to be separated from us. We'd be taking a less than direct approach, ourselves.
The thing about Archades was that it just wasn't as secure as one might think it was. Even though the city had been deemed off limits to non-citizens because of the execution, there was definitely a way for us to sneak in and that particular knowledge was thanks to Balthier. It was a pity that Metris Moro Solidor was focusing so largely on Archades when there was another place close by that he was neglecting to keep quite as secure: Old Archades.
Old Archades wasn't what it used to be, or so I was told. Back in the day, it was coming apart at the seams and was the place where those who were less fortunate were left to try and survive. Under Larsa's rule, it had experienced some vast improvements. Still, though, Metris was failing to secure the passageway that brought one into Old Archades from the Sochen Cave Palace. That was a mistake that we were going to capitalize on.
'Hang on, Larsa,' I thought as the door of the airship was closed behind us. 'We're coming.'