06 – Sprawling Growth
By Chronic Guardian
Written for Twelve Shots of Summer: Nine Tales, Week 6 – Springtime of Youth, Loss of the Leader
"The fact of the matter is," the lithe Viera girl said to Heiru, leaning down to his level and playfully swinging her clasped hands behind her, "You don't know where you're going."
"You can't know that," he retorted, "I've only just gotten here."
Heiru, short for an Aegyl, tried to flair his wings just a little to give himself more presence. He had passed this Viera twice already on his current survey of the Feywood and each time had managed to avoid her offers at help. Now, however, he felt too exhausted to fly and hadn't waved her off in time, so she had caught him in the jaws of assistance.
What a bother.
"You keep looking at that map," she pushed on, tapping her fingers on the top of the object and causing Heiru to hug it protectively away from her reach. Her long, rabbit ears twitched in an expression he wasn't familiar with. "Why else would you look at a map?"
"I am making a map," he said earnestly. "My people are new to this region of Ivalice."
The Viera girl sucked in her lower lip to thoughtfully chew and studied him again. "You are lost," she pronounced again, "And I am going to un-lose you."
Before Heiru could argue the point further, she had taken his hand and was towing him through the forest paths away from the clearing.
}§{
"It's not a forest, it's a jungle," the Viera, Robyn, told him when he voiced his uncertainty in her ability to navigate the trees. "There's a difference."
"It's a wood, then," Heiru clarified. "I don't care. We have passed now the place where you found me at least three times."
She frowned at him. "How can you tell?"
"I've been making a map," he reminded her, tempted to bring the artifact out for emphasis were he not afraid she would snatch it away in turn. "and regardless of what you say about my relative inexperience, I at least know how to read a compass!"
"Well your compass must be wrong," she explained patiently. "I am listening to the wood itself as I lead you."
"Perhaps the woods want us lost," Heiru grunted, glancing over his shoulder joint as his wings fluffed. He already wasn't sure about these Ivalician woods, but if they were speaking then he only mistrusted them further.
Robyn only chortled, "Why would it want that?"
A wayward wind brushed the treetops, sending down whispers of the world Heiru had known. As a tentacled Malboro pod slurped on what looked like bones a few branches over, he decided this Viera girl was either murderously evil, criminally niave, or both. With any luck, he would discover the difference before it became fatal.
}§{
It wasn't that Heiru disliked exploring. As a matter of course with map making, he rather enjoyed charting out new areas and finding new things. Even if the whole of Lemurés had been charted before its fall, he had loved making his own charts as he journeyed the fanes for himself.
However, when Heiru did explore, he liked to do so at his own pleasure.
"You know, I think you may be correct," Robyn said, frowning at her surroundings as they rounded another tree and hound calls began to echo in the wooded corridors. Sunlight had faded and the jungle corridors had taken on a dusky tone. Spiderwebs of mossy vines choked out the darkening skies and wood imps began to cackle to each other from their hollows. "Perhaps I am not listening correctly…"
"Do your people make it a habit to abduct strangers on the word of the wood?" Heiru asked, finally plucking up the courage to bring in questions of culture. The leaders of the Aegyl exile might wage war on the woodland Viera if they discovered such a conflict of interest, but Heiru hoped they could keep it to a mutual ignorance. The Aegyl had seen enough strife lately with the loss of Lemurés, their airborne home. It would be a shame to start their new lives with even more bloodshed.
"The wood-warders occasionally lead wanderers out of the wood," Robyn said, as if that were in some way equivalent to what she was up to with Heiru. "I would like to be one someday… and thought if I proved myself then perhaps I would not have to don the suit of a salve-maker."
Ah, so it was a rite of passage. Heiru felt a twinge of relief knowing that it might not be actual malice that was detaining him here. At least he wouldn't have to fight for his life.
"Well, I would say we've had a dreadful time of it," he said absently, "but you haven't exactly gotten us more lost."
Quite the contrary, he'd been able to chart a good deal of the undergrowth under her guidance. He was holding it in his head until he could safely put ink to parchment, yes, but the repeated tracing of their steps had helped solidify the figures.
Robyn stopped beside him, let go of his hand, and gave a pathetic, prolonged, mewling cry.
Heiru started back, unsure of what to do with himself. His first instinct was to run for the clearing and fly away as fast as his wings would carry him. He did not understand why she was crying and, as a general rule, tried to avoid things he didn't understand. He was good at maps, at picking out landscape features and arranging them in a way that made sense to other people. Good enough, even, that he never had to explain himself.
Unfortunately, map making would not stop him from feeling something was wrong with Robyn and somehow it was his fault.
Robyn shook her head and rubbed her eyes on her forearm. "I've broken the Green Law, and now the wood has disowned me! I thought—" She sobbed, "—I th-thought it was a just the other Viera when I showed those Moogles the way to Bur-Omisace. But no! The wood itself has left me and now I am so lost I cannot even lead a stranger. Oh, how miserable I am!"
Heiru wrapped himself in his wings in embarrassment. "So… you're a fugitive?" he asked awkwardly, staying outside of arms-reach but leaning towards the girl in a vague show of sympathy.
"I… I am an outcast!"
"So, yes: a fugitive," Heiru surmised, liking his word for it better. Fugitives did things and sought refuge; outcasts were just thrown out whether they did anything or not.
"I do not know your Hume words!" Robyn fumed, turning away from him. "Oh, how impudent you are! How impudent am I! How much ruin we have wrought with our impudent youth!"
"I have wrought no ruin, thank you," Heiru said. "I have only charted this region and will be happy to never bring my people back here if the wood finds us so upsetting."
The trail of wood planks they had been traversing creaked as Robyn turned sharply back to him. "You cannot leave me! It is your fault the Green Law is broken! If I hadn't tried to aid you—"
"You said yourself it was broken already."
"When?!"
"The Moogles," Heiru said, unable to keep a slight disdain out of his voice for the psuedo-airbourne species. His Aegyl pride still felt slightly injured that Lemurés had fallen in any part to their doing.
"It-It was almost broken! You finished the breaking!"
"Excuse me," Heiru said coolly, his sympathies dried by the accusation. "I would like not to be made an accomplice to your failings."
"You—!" Robyn cut herself off with a look of pure consternation and flapped her thin arms like frail imitations of wings. "I demand you take me with you, Hare-oo!"
"Heiru."
"I do not speak your bird tongue!"
"Funny," Heiru flared his wings. "I don't speak rabbit."
Bending his knees, he leapt into the air and flapped. The jungle screamed with excitement and howls of frustration as creatures of the night jumped after him. But Heiru was a winged man, a member of the Aegyl race. If he met his end, it would not be by falling.
Rising back above the winding pathways, he broke the treeline and flew into the night.
}§{
Heiru made it back to his people, gathered in camps on the Ozmone Plain and chasing off the grotesque intrusive fauna nosing in on the new arrivals. It hurt that his work would mainly be used to tell the Aegyl where not to settle, but it was important work, and one had to start somewhere.
The news disgruntled the flock, who were still coming to terms with the emotions unleashed by the fall of Lemurés. While Heiru had always thought the Aegyl a fair and evenhanded people, they now made decisions based on their hopes and expectations more than the requested performance, and they had hoped he would find a place to roost.
The first suggestion was to kill him for wasting a day's ration on making a map that could be bought from Moogles—Moogles! Cooler heads managed to prevail, however, and demote the sentence to exile.
And thus, Heiru of the Aegyl found himself shivering on the far end of the Ozmone Plain, wondering what on earth he was supposed to do if he weren't making maps for the Aegyl. And it was just about then that Robyn of the Viera emerged breathless from the brush to lean on her knees and wheeze at him.
"...Yes?" he asked after a moment. He would have liked to be more eloquent, but the loss of his people was a trifle wearing on his patience.
"You..." she managed to breathe. "Take me… take me with you!"
"I..." Heiru stopped and shook his head, trying to untangle where he would even begin with the latest developments. "Are you sure?" he asked. "It's just me now."
"This is your fault," she reiterated, straightening up a little as her left ear twitched. "So it's you I'll—wait, what do you mean it's 'just you'?"
"I'm afraid I've been exiled."
"Oh."
For a few moments, they kept a respectful silence between them. Robyn's ear still twitched, but she at least tried not to fidget. "Are you… a fugelive?" she said hesitantly, once the proper mourning period had been observe.
"Fugetive," Heiru corrected. "And… well, I suppose. Although I cannot say which law I have broken, be it green or otherwise."
"Would you like to fuge together?"
"To…? Ah." He caught her meaning along with a strange feeling in his stomach that hoped against hope this would be the beautiful start to something new while anxiously suspecting he was headed straight into a cliff-face. "I… Yes, I suppose," he finished, not quite satisfied with what she meant by "like", but unwilling to try his chances against the whole of Ivalice alone.
"Good," Robyn smiled and brushed her left ear so it stopped twitching. She shyly stepped closer and watched as he failed to retreat. "I think… I think we are as a sapling struck from its source, but grafted anew into living wood."
Heiru simply looked to the horizon and took stock of the materials he had left for map making. "Well, at least there's room to grow," he answered without thinking it over too hard. She was still an odd thing, but the feeling in his stomach had shifted a little more towards hope and a little less towards anxiety. "If nothing else, I suppose you could use a good cartographer."
They were still young, and lost in a grand world just waiting to be explored.
-Fin-
Author's Notes
I've wanted to write about more Ivalice goings on for a while now, and although I think my whimsical proclivities are more suited to the Tactics Advance line of Ivalician shenanigans, I've specifically wanted to write a Viera and Aegyl couple who travel Ivalice and explore its eccentricities of life together. Originally, it was going to be Robyn and Rabitt (The joke being the Bunny-like Viera was named for a bird and the bird-like Aegyl was named for a bunny), but I didn't commit to the name and we ended up here. Following true FFXII Viera conventions, Robyn would probably be Rbjn, but that's an easter egg to plant for another tale. For now, we have her name as Heiru hears it.
These two may show up again at some point, but in the mean time I hope they have proven entertaining enough. One of my favorite parts of FFXII Ivalice is how lived in it feels and how many little plotlines you can find running through the world without reference to the main party. It is in that spirit that Robyn and Heiru may one day venture forth again and explore Ivalice as Partners in Exile. Until then, please check out Twelve Shots of Summer for more stories, writers, and prompts to get you started on your own works.
See you around!
-CG [7.20.22]