(I wrote this piece for an FFXIV zine “Answers” back in late 2019/early 2020; the zine included art based on each line of the namesake theme “Answers,” as well as longer stories/art for each subsequent expansion musical theme. I was entrusted with “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” the theme of Shadowbringers, and decided to focus on themes of healing, clarity, purpose, and peace. This was written not long after 5.0, and before the following patches were released, so given the story beats that came after which I was not aware of at the time of writing this, I’m very proud of my work. Please enjoy!)
“What do you remember?”
The Crystal Exarch breathed deeply, laying his head against the cool crystalline wall at his back. “That… is a difficult question, my friend.” Time is unforgiving, and memories are fickle shards of distorted circus-glass. After over a century, his mind was a maze of distortions.
He gazed upward and marveled—as he did almost every night, now—at a sky scattered with countless stars whose names and movements were forgotten by a people who had long stopped looking towards the heavens. “Rarely can I picture them. But not a day goes by that I do not feel them.” Out of the corner of his eye, he caught his companion tilt their head in silent inquiry.
He held out his hand towards his bemused friend, but even with an invitation they hesitated. Only with his reassurance did they finally clasp his hand in theirs, blood-and-bone warmth over sharp blue ice.
Their eyes widened. “A pulse?”
“Not just one, my friend. Many. Through past and present they walked, worked, dreamed—and the Crystal Tower exists in all the times and spaces they touched.” He grasped his friend’s hand more tightly, and if the crystal edges dug into their palm, they did not flinch. He smiled and bowed his head. “And thus do I still recall them…”
The first footsteps. His friend knew these steps intimately, remembered the small smile over his shoulder to assure them the good in his good-bye. “I eagerly await the future born of your courage.”
And he was alone. Alone in that tower, and yet… a pulse of echoed life under his feet, even then. It was the steps of the ancients that walked alongside him—steps that imbued the tower with a heartbeat, one of hope and sweat and tears and all things that defined life from merely living. Now that heartbeat lulled him into a deep sleep as a captain aboard his ship…
Until new steps disturbed his pulsing metronome. Not alone, this time.
(This time, he expected them.)
He had anticipated no interruption to his slumber. His senses, sharp from decades of meditative stasis, piqued even through his veil of slumber. The doors opened, and the footfalls stepped past the threshold.
(Heavily the door swung, a sharp intake, thief’s breath in the night, but they made otherwise no noise as they entered.)
Certain and swift were these approachers, but their certainty was wrought from the bitterest edges of mortal bearing.
(One pair of footsteps rushing, relief spreading out from them, so clean and pure here, a sanctuary. The others hesitant, wary of entrapment in this enclosed space, some terrible new ploy concocted by the monsters outside.)
Their desperate surety called out to the tower’s halls, and she hummed in response. One voice broke through the others, “Over here, you lot—help me with these doors—”
(“This tower must be something important, otherwise it can’t’ve just appeared—”)
“For gods’ sake, you can’t just force it, man! Here, let me…”
(“Careful now, it’s liable to disappear as like it arrived, I shouldn’t wonder. We shouldn’t—”)
“Linger a moment—look at Garlond’s illustrations. Is that—”
(“—really any better out there than in here, sinner?”)
“Yes, it’s just as Cid described, down to the— “
(“—last thing we need, along with everything else! We shouldn’t-—”)
“Wait— ”
They found him. Enclosed in his solitude, only beginning to stir.
(“This door’s open, I think there’s someone here—”
He emerged from the shadows, hands held aloft in peaceful gesture.)
“You’re him as was laid in the Crystal Tower, then? The Warrior of Light’s companion—“
(The Hyur jumped behind her tall companion — almost like a Miqo’te but not, her ears and legs impossibly long. The Hyur’s sword shook, but the taller woman’s grip on her bow was steady… deadly. “Friend or foe, Mystel?” the archer demanded. “Name yourself — “)
“You’re G’raha — ”
“ — Exarch?”
The Crystal Exarch jumped. “Ah — yes? I’m sorry, I missed what you said.” He smiled and attempted an embarrassed laugh as the young woman sighed. Her handsome face was curtained by long locks of seafoam hair, and generations later, the Exarch would smile recalling the near twinning appearance of her descendent, but for now, she and her Viis friend were his first and only acquaintances here — the first to find him, the first to hear him out.
The first to help set everything in motion.
Clearing her throat, she repeated, “They just arrived — those that remain of the carpenters guilds.”
“Ah, excellent!” he exclaimed, but even his enthusiasm couldn’t wrest a smile from the woman. “Let us see what tidings they bring…”
(“…wish we had more to show, but the rest of the ‘works took off a long time ago,” the Roegadyn admitted. The uniforms hung loosely on the shoulders of those gathered.
G’raha remembered those outfits, once so brightly and proudly blue and white, now patched and patched again, faded into dull grey, much like the drawn faces that stared back at him from across a dark room lit only by one flickering lantern. Their hands, as scarred as their faces from scraping every inch of life they could grasp, were limp at their sides…)
“It isn’t much,” the guildmaster admitted as he saw the Exarch approach, “but these hands will remember the weight of the trade.” He hefted one of the hammers like it was made of gold, despite the handle that had all but succumbed to dry rot. The crowd that had gathered around him stood straighter.
“It’s enough,” the Exarch reassured the carpenters. Their tools were almost rusted to dust from years of exposure behind long-abandoned homes and shed, but those who had survived remembered what they’d left behind, and retrieved the tools with eagerness — every inch they could manage. The hammers and saws were almost foreign in their discarded familiarity, but they were not entirely forgotten.
(The papers frayed and curled along the edges, handled with the gentlest of care, but worn all the same. “We haven’t the resources to copy them,” the Roegadyn apologized. His large hands unrolled the scroll as a mother holds her child. The parchment, by G’raha’s reckoning, was over a century old.
“I have resources,” he said, and placed a hand on his companion’s shoulder. They had awoken him to a world swallowed in shadow, and he would not leave them to drown in the darkness alone.
For a moment the Roegadyn’s expression softened, and G’raha fleetingly recognized an old friend.)
Over the coming weeks, the Exarch witnessed as scholars and engineers, once scattered to any precious corner of safety they could find in this light-washed world, rejoined their peers on this barren patch of earth with no protection from the searing rays overhead. They hunched in the makeshift tent around his blueprints, their hands hovering inches above the fine printing. In hushed whispers they noted the finery of the printing as much as the plans themselves.
“And where are the homes here?” A voice that the Exarch recognized cut through the murmuring. The young Viis that had also stumbled upon the Tower approached the clustered scholars, her heels barely touching the ground with each bold step. They, a gathering of Humes and Elves, parted at her approach, for Viis were rarer sights in those days. She paid them no mind and, when she had reached the table, tapped a single long fingernail on the blueprints.
(The sound of working hands was a constant in the Tower now. Machinations spun off and on as voices reverberated through the halls, recounting successes and failures as near-indecipherable notes generations-old were made real.
“Ye lived here?” an Hyur asked him one day.
“I survived,” G’raha replied. He watched the young man wipe down his tools with a rag of a rag, but the tools themselves were almost new — protected and cleaned and guarded every day for… how long? Waiting for what, waiting for now? Did they sing in his hands as he set them to work, did they sing with the Tower? “Just as you survived. But now…”
“…Now?” Despite the shadows under his eyes, the young man’s gaze burned bright, and his hands were steady.
G’raha found himself smiling. “Now, what we’re doing is — “)
“Living, how are we to do it?” the Viis demanded again, when no reply came. She turned the blueprints round, sharp eyes darting up and down the construction lines.
Several of those gathered stiffened, but the Exarch inquired, “What mean you?”
“Is this merely a fortress?” she asked. “Or is this home?”
The scholars glanced nervously amongst themselves, but it was the carpenters who spoke first. They crowded around the Viis, talking over each other and motioning wildly to the blueprints. Before the Exarch could interrupt, bits of charcoal appeared in the carpenters’ hands, and new lines — rough in edge but sure in execution — tore across the paper.
“Where should the garden be? Perhaps down — “
” — where those platforms overlook the bridge, yeah?”
“Well we’ve got to have markets, haven’t we?”
“See those canopies there? That’d be the perfect spot — “
” — and then they can lead right up to the — “
” — living quarters, yes!”
The Viis stepped back from the builders, and a small smile flirted across her dark face when they finally came up for air from their planning. She peered sideways at the Crystal Exarch. “Well then, it looks like you are ready to start building, would you not say?”
“Ready?”
G’raha placed a hand gently on the door of the Crystal Tower. His arm hummed in tune with the structure; work had made the crystallized limb feel almost normal, much like standing before the entrance felt eerily familiar. The knot in his stomach, however, was wholly new. Dread was not; dread was a constant companion in this future, he had discovered. He feared it always would be for those he was now leaving behind. “I’ll never be fully ready. I wasn’t last time, either — but I didn’t know that then.”
“I wouldn’t think so.” The Roegadyn G’raha had toiled beside over long, brutal months stepped out from the crowd. Those gathered were all gazing upward, a sea of faded blues and grays, their faces aglow in the light of the tower. “Gods only know what you’re getting yourself into. But whatever it is, we’ve taken you — ”
(“ — as far as we can, but…” The Viis’s voice trailed off.
“Yes?” the Exarch asked.
Far beneath the catwalks that stretched over the rookery, where they sat, legs dangling, the sound of workers could be heard. The scent of freshly overturned earth wafted up on the dawn breeze. She breathed deeply, then stretched out a hand towards the horizon, and said, “Now, we can go — “)
” — further than perhaps even Cid imagined.” The crowd shuffled as he said the old Garlean’s name. Several heads bowed, but the Roegadyn’s gaze never broke from G’raha’s.
“I’m sorry he isn’t here to see this,” G’raha said.
“I have faith — he’ll know.” The roegadyn nodded. “The past will know. They have to.”
“I’ll make sure of it.”
Biggs the Third smiled, the lines across his face creasing almost painfully. “That’s all we can hope for.” He held out a large hand, which G’raha shook firmly.
“You can’t look forward to the past, though,” G’raha pointed out.
(“We should look to the future!” his friend exclaimed, spreading her hands wide as if to embrace the world beyond the violet treetops. “For here, now, yes. But once most of the work is settled? Lakeland, Kholusia, Ahm Ahreng… they are all of them in need also. We cannot keep our vision only to the now — “)
“No, we can’t,” Biggs admitted. He looked over his shoulder at their allies, companions, friends, standing tall, eyes shining. “But if we can rebuild the future for the past — “
(“ — we must needs walk forward!” She stood and turned, heels clicking, her gaze landing on the Crystal Tower, a beacon in the morning light. “And with you here, Exarch — “)
“—we can finally rebuild our own present, too, I reckon. ‘Cause thanks to you—“
(“ — our path is finally clear.”)
He opened his eyes, brought back to that hand clasped around his: warmth over ice, and the lives that sang as the pulse beneath it all, beating in time to his heart as blood in his veins.
For the first time over the past, present, and future of a hundred years, with scattered memories like a ray of light scattered through a prism, the distortions of his mind finally rejoined in harmonious reflection… and he remembered.
(If you’d like a behind-the-scenes look at my thoughts and process behind this short story, check out my free Ko-fi post, “Reflecting on Reflections”! And if you’d like to read a short story I wrote back in 2015(!) that inspired this FFXIV fic, you can donate to my Ko-fi to read it here: “Four Conversations; or, The Heart of Things: A Dragon Age Story.” Every bit of support means the world! Thanks for reading!)
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