Chapter Eight: Wandering Viera, wind and wood
Mjrn was missing. Mjrn had left the safety of the Wood's embrace and vanished into Hume danger. Fran could not help but wonder if this was not, in some way, her fault?
The Henne Mines reeked of Mist and danger, a place of darkness and foreboding even without the Imperials bodies littering the entrance.
Redmaws and Steelings screeched over head, swooping down upon the party with leeching bites, Larsa fought valiantly to keep them all alive. Balthier blasted away with Sirius, his mood much as her own, darkening, with every step they took deeper into the mines.
'Stay away power needy Hume!'
To see Mjrn again after so many years, and to see her in such distress, a puppet whose strings were pulled by the power of Mist, horrified Fran. Was this the punishment for one who trespassed against the laws of the Green Way?
Chasing after Mjrn heedlessly only to be confronted by a Wyrm of tremendous size Fran was chastened by guilt to realise that Balthier, the children and the Princess had followed her straight into danger also.
The fight was vicious and prolonged. No one escaped injury. The Princess fell bloodied and exhausted, apologies on her lips that she was not strong enough, her Knight with tattered and blackened honour waded in under the talons of the beast to save her.
Vaan, nimble as the rats he used to sharpen his sword blade on, danced and parried and managed to hack at one huge knee joint until the great beast was crippled.
Penelo cast as quickly and fervently as she could, glowing with healing magicks while Fran endlessly notched arrow to bow and loosed her projectiles towards the target.
Larsa fell in the midst of throwing potions to Basch to aid the Princess and it was Balthier who caught the boy prince under his arms and dragged him away from the fight.
An explosion of magick, impatient and sharp, signified Balthier had thrown a protective shield over Fran. His magicks were always thus, as if his resentment in using them came through in the casting.
'Why won't this thing die?' Vaan demanded aggrieved as he backed off to catch his breath and cast a revival spell on Larsa.
' Its life wanes, we must press on.'
Fran panted notching another arrow only to feel the crashing pop of a shell shield fall upon her instants before the Wyrm breathed jets of flame down on them.
Balthier, bleeding from a scalp wound and favouring one leg clustered over to her as Larsa, pale and wane staggered over to the Princess who had returned to the fight despite her obvious injuries.
When the Wyrm finally fell, crashing to the caverns stony floor, none of the party was truly strong enough to muster much reaction when the odd, faceless, visage of Mist rose from Mrjn's tormented body and abandoned her.
Mjrn gave her story, so very familiar to Fran, that of a curiosity that could not be smothered; a need like a pain in the heart to know more of the world. Fran could only listen in near silence. She wondered if her sister could hear her heart bleeding.
It was the pain of severance. Mjrn had not forgotten her sister or the bonds of sorority that had once been the greatest power upon Fran's life. Mjrn's eyes, her pleasure in her sisters return unmasked, silently begged Fran not to relinquish those bonds once more.
It mattered not. Fran looked up to finally acknowledge the weight of Balthier's gaze on her. His expression bland, smooth and unmoved, leaving his eyes to bleed sympathy, devoid, for once, of the selfishness he had in spades.
The Wood no longer whispered in her ears, the Green Way responded to her commands only very reluctantly, a battle of wills it had been to reveal the secret entrance to Eruyt back in Golmore. Not between herself and the Wood she had distained so long ago, but within herself.
A battle between the remnant of Viera teachings that remained in Fran that fought constantly, though silently, with the part of Fran that would throw down the bonds of sisterhood, culture and responsibility for an open sky and a set of Glossair rings.
Even as she spoke softly to Mjrn as they travelled the path back to Eruyt, even as she savoured the closeness, the indescribable sense of certainty and calm that being with her own kind brought her, Fran knew what her choice would be. What it had always and ever would be.
In the Wood time was cyclical. The seasons bought death and renewal in the constant ebb and flow of biting black frost and fledgling thaw. What withered and was lost would return anew, strong and proud in but an eye blink of time to Viera and Wood both.
Flying above the Wood and the green earth, there was only one direction, that of the wind. Time was measured in the swift, fleeting movements of clouds ever onwards never backwards. There was no past, no future, only now.
Fran could no longer hear the constant, loving, but passive certainty of the Wood, but the swift whisper of the wind was with her always.
Sharp, inconstant and immediate the way of the sky, that which she had given her life to these fifty years since, would be drowned out in the depths of Golmore, should she return home.
The wind and the sky was too inconstant to provide the ever-constant nurturing of the Wood, yet without the song of the sky Fran could not function, and she had long since discovered she needed little in the way of nurture.
She knew when she approached Jote that her elder sister knew also the choice Fran had made, that her conviction of so long ago had diminished none. Jote knew, though she would never understand.
Fran left Eruyt with stolen keys to unlock the Woods doors, doors that had once opened to her freely. She left flanked on one side by the Hume who was to her the wind that whispered in her ears, driving her onwards, and surrounded by Humes whom would accept her wholeheartedly for they knew no better.
All the way to the path of verdant praise Fran heard her sister Mjrn's tears, just as she had fifty years before. The memory, Fran knew, would haunt her for another fifty years to come. But not even those tears had power enough to sway her soul from its chosen path.