Summary: Looking out over the water, Rhea wonders how she's going to stop what they discovered down beneath Castrum Occidens.
Author's Note: OC Work w/ MSQ References
Rhea stood on the banks of the cliffs behind the Waking Sands. Looking out over the ocean, she tried to process everything her and Alisaie had uncovered. Bahamut was alive and recharging beneath the earth, draining the land of its aether little by little, hampering its healing. Louisoix was alive yet made no move to reconnect with his granddaughter or warn the realm above.
Where one question got answers, a dozen more sprung up in its wake. Nothing made sense and deep in the belly of those Allagan shards of Dalamud was a monstrous primal that could awaken and bring ruin to Eorzea once more. The world had barely survived his first release and that was during a time when there had been multiple Warriors of Light to face him.
Now there was just the one - her. Should Bahamut return, she doubted she would be able to stop him even with the Blessing of Light. They couldn't. How could she?
She missed the days when she only had the Allagan Ultima Weapon to deal with. Her mind turned to the Crystal Tower, wondering if, perhaps, a solution to Bahamut resided there but even the Allagan's could only contain him.
Reaching up, she rubbed her temples, feeling a migraine coming on. She hadn't had one since she was a young child. Once upon a time, she used to be plagued with them relentlessly but, in time, she seemed to 'grow out of them'. Of late, however, they'd begun to return - particularly since she came back from the brink of death after her battle with Lahabrea. She'd kept them at bay, in secret, with special tinctures and medicines. Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn't. She figured it was from the stress. When the weight of the world rested on your shoulders, it was hard not to feel stress from it. The only thing she knew is she had to keep them secret. It would not continue to inspire faith in the people who looked to her if they saw her felled by a headache, mind breaking as they were.
Taking a deep breath of the sea air and warm sands around her, she basked in the heat of the evening. She hated the arid, seemingly lifelessness of the desert but she loved the heat. Five years in perpetual winter after having been raised in verdant, lush greenery of the way Coerthas used to be had made her appreciate it all the more. She preferred Gridania and the Shroud but the Thanalan heat was still welcome to her Ishgardian bones. The fresh air also helped, at least to a degree, to relieve some of the tension in her muscles. She'd miss the heat of Vesper Bay when they moved to Mor Dhona, though she was happy to be rid of the sand.
Idly, without thought, her finger ran over the soft handkerchief in her pocket as her thoughts churned and chewed on the dilemma at hand. It wasn't until Alisaie chimed through her linkshell that she brought her mind back to the present. There was more work to be done, and far more to investigate, if they were to return and deal with Bahamut before his awakening. And, true to her nature, it seemed as if Alisaie was ready to go.
With one final look out onto sunset orange skies, Rhea steeled herself and tossed back one of the vials she kept on her person, hoping this time would be one of the times the tincture helped her headache.
It was time to go back to work and once more save the world from darkness - as such was the life of the Warrior of Light.