[October 4] [Fire Emblem 11] False Dawn
Oct. 4th, 2009 03:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runicloreFalse Dawn
Author: Amber Michelle
Day/Theme: 4 - So many breezes, but never enough
Gauntlet Theme: 14 - Hate me, hate yourself
Series: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon
Characters: Nyna, Camus
Rating: K
Words: 2482
Notes: for the record, I'm aware of the "myths" and "facts" surrounding apple seeds and cyanide. :p
..................................................................
Two knights of the Sable Order examined Nyna's chambers before she was allowed to return to them. Sharp objects were removed - the letter opener, a knife used to core an apple the afternoon before, though it seemed days ago, maybe a week; the remains of her food were removed (the pips contained poison, and what if she cracked enough of them between her teeth for their ambrosia?), the glass pitcher and basin were replaced with wooden twins, the scissors she used to trim her nails disappeared. She was allowed candles to light her way at night, polished wood for her plates and bowls, wood for her utensils. Objects light enough for her lift were removed so she might not break the windows, either for their glass or to attempt escape, and the balcony doors were boarded up from the outside. Camus, it seemed, knew almost as many methods of suicide as she did.
He did not allow a bath, but a female servant, Grustian by her accent, brought two buckets of water with which to wash her hair, and allowed her enough extra to fill the shallow wooden basin and sponge her skin clean. They'd left her oils and lotions, the rosewater in its slim crystal vial, but Nyna dressed quickly while her chaperon watched and left her hair loose against her back to dampen the cotton dress. She wore white - a simple high-collared dress and a bell-sleeved robe embroidered according to her rank, but otherwise unadorned. Her captor's gaze lingered on the stringy blanket of her hair soaking her back and commanded a servant outside to fetch a fresh towel and send another with firewood.
Nyna turned her face away from him and looked out the window. A small pleasure garden climbed the walls outside between the four wings of her palace; ivy tangled and clung to the stone and curled around the window moldings, moss caked the crevices and corners. Cherry trees spread their lacy pink boughs to make shallow domes over the greenery. She watched them shift in a breeze. It would be cool, fresh, like the slide of mint tea down one's throat and into an empty stomach.
Camus asked if she had been treated well, if she found fault with his servants-- beyond their allegiance, he said when Nyna told him she could do without his Grustian watch dogs ogling her every move. "Shall I assign you a companion, your highness?"
"That will not be necessary." She wished the chair were closer to her table to hide the clench of her fingers around the arms, but scooting across the floor would be noisy and undignified. "Stop troubling yourself on my account."
His lips parted for a reply that went unsaid when two servants entered, one of which Nyna recognized from the gardens, who bowed quickly and almost dropped her armload of firewood - small branches, mostly, sawed clean of sharp edges. They rattled against each other in her arms. Flint and tinder were drawn from a pouch on her belt. Her companion, the same girl who supervised Nyna's bath, approached without so much as a nod and draped her peach towel over the back of the chair to gather her hair.
"Your continued health is a matter of some import, unless you intend to abandon Archaneia." The maid pulled her hair when she took a quick breath to snap her reply, and he said, "My liege will come to his senses in time, and I would like you to be well and ready for that eventuality." Camus crossed the rug in four long strides that made the skirt of his long coat sway, the flare of the fabric leaving his shadow to stretch wide and dark across the room. He sat down in the opposite chair, adjusting his sword so it hung over the arm. "I'm told you have not eaten yet, today."
Nyna leaned forward, her fingers aching with the force in her grip on the chair arms, and felt the girl wrap a towel around her hair and squeeze. "I didn't give you permission to be seated in my presence, lord knight."
"With all due respect," he said, emulating her posture, leaning forward, "you are in no position to criticize."
"It's only a matter of time," she said, echoing her earlier thoughts. Nyna leaned back at the maid's insistent pull, felt her hands press the towel to her roots. "The eventuality you speak of will never come. I won't live on my knees, and I won't die bending my neck for the blade of a barbarian. Courtesy is a thin veil for what you really are, Camus the Sable. Take your assurances to the wall and parrot them to my parents-- they will care more."
He leaned back, and something curled in her chest when he refused to rise, instead nodding to the girl when she finished toweling Nyna's hair and sending her off with a gesture of his black-gloved hand. Her mother was the last person to sit in that chair. They'd sliced apples and cheese with short silver knives and arranged plates for each other, talking about the war and when it would surely end because, her mother said, Medeus was an old foe, a myth, unable to show himself outside of his castle. Surely he would raze their troops with his flaming breath if he were able, would he not?
To win a war, her mother said, repeating what they'd both heard from the king, cultivate a legend that will turn the tide of battle. The shadow dragon is just that-- a shadow. No-- the monster under Nyna's bed when she was four summers old and insisted her maids remain in her chamber with a lamp on all night.
It was all a nightmare, and she couldn't wake up.
She heard the fire kindle and snap. The orange glinted on Camus's fair hair, blushed the strands, the plane of his cheek, the muscle cording his neck above the high collar. "In two hours," he said, his tone still even and dispassionate, "I will be present to test your meal for poison. If necessary, I will feed you myself."
If eyes could have glinted like steel, she thought his would have stabbed her. Nyna wanted to slap the table and tell him to go to the fiery hell beneath Dolhr and take his charity with him. Instead, she said, "I will not dine with you."
"Nor I with you," Camus said, rising, bracing his hands on his knees. The chair creaked, the scabbard of his sword hit the legs. "It would be inappropriate." He spread his hand to the front of his coat and bowed. "Good day, princess."
He waited at the door for the servant to leave her station by the fireplace and scurry out ahead of him, and did not look back once before he pulled the door closed and faded from her senses, his footsteps a receding tap on the marble floor of the corridor. Nyna's hand trembled when she pushed hair from her face and gathered the length at the back of her neck in both hands. Pink petals drifted past her window and caught in the lead between the diamond panes, fluttering until another breeze pulled them away. The sun had passed her window, risen overhead, shining on filmy green and gray patterns below- the paths, the ivy, the manicured bushes.
The wood in her hearth burned faintly sweet while she combed her fingers through her hair and picked at tangles with her broken nails. It spread over her breast and fanned on her lap, dull beige and a hint of orange from the flames. Almost like her mother's hair, she thought, but not quite, not red enough, even in fire. Mud and gore had not dimmed it when Nyna saw it last, drifting on the air, tangled around rope--
If she never saw the color again, it would still remain in her memory as Archaneia's false dawn.
.
Her knight captor tasted her food as promised, perhaps to prove his good will, and Nyna allowed him to complete this duty in silence. He must realize - though he pretended ignorance so well - that she didn't care if his servants hid poison in her food-- that she waited, in fact, for the moment they would slip something past him, something Camus could not detect in time, or perhaps inured himself against as a measure of safety. He was no mere knight, but a general; he was no minor noble, but the son of an ancient Grustian House who maintained some political importance himself, if not much in the way of power. Grust was an isolated, mountainous land, and its politics were equally rough. She'd heard the farmers fought the soil every year for a harvest, and Archaneia's surplus harvest had fed the peasants for decades. No doubt they were eager for change.
And-- perhaps the same could be said for their king. What would he do if Camus was correct and he would allow her to live? Hold Archaneia hostage? Demand her hand in marriage? There had been talk of offering her to the crown prince, the king's brother; before that, there was discussion of handing her off to Michalis of Macedon, though her mother opposed it. She wouldn't see her daughter sent to a land where Dolhr's spawn speckled the sky like black stars-- and it was no use telling her wyverns weren't a strain of dark dragons. Let them be absorbed again by the darkness that bore them became her response to the proposal, and the matter was dropped.
It wouldn't have mattered. King Michalis, it was said, approached Dolhr willingly for an alliance. Nyna would have been given to the enemy, her death - or worse - assured.
She need only remind herself of that to recognize her fortune. In Archaneia, she had a captor who wished to preserve her life, whatever his purpose. If only her parents had been so lucky.
.
The former king and queen of Archaneia were released from their bondage two weeks after the fall of the city and embalmed, then wrapped in canvas, put into their caskets before Nyna was allowed to attend their remains for a proper burial. The lids were already nailed shut when she saw them into the family mausoleum, Camus's shadow enveloping her own as they marched through the steel-bound doors behind the funeral bearers. There was no service - only Nyna, with a prayer uttered in an unsteady voice, to lift Boah's ceremonial staff with its spell light and seal them away with a final formula in the old dialect.
Boah should have been there to do it, or Miloah, yet there was no sign of either. They would have met their ends on Grustian blades if not Dolhr's, it was certain, but Nyna hoped to be proven wrong.
Camus required her to return the staff to the keeping of his own clerics afterward, with assurances they were treating Archaneia's artifacts with respect and it would be returned to the vaults below the palace. Nyna asked after the crates and goods stored in her throne room the morning they met, and his returning remark - riches may be regained - left a sour taste in her mouth. She stared at a spot in his back that seemed to be centered between his shoulder blades, wondered if her glare might inspire him to shrug and wonder if an arrow were aimed for his back.
But naturally not; the palace was firmly in his grasp. The colors of the Sable Order, gold and black, were at every window and door, stationed at the beginning and end of every corridor. Camus's posture remained upright and stiff, as though he still wore his armor, and guards flanked the gate to the private garden so often seen from her windows. Others waited across the way, visible to Nyna through the foliage only because the golden decorations on their armor and surcoats glinted in the noon sunlight when they moved to and from the shaded steps.
The branches of her cherry trees undulated in the wind. Cool fingers of air caressed her face, tickled the back of her neck, and pulled the long tails of her hair from her back to drift. Pink and white petals littered the flagstone walk, flitted along the air currents while they drifted downward, tugged loose by the breeze.
Why did they not burn it? The object of Dolhr was surely to destroy Archaneia, not simply subjugate its commons. Her city lay half-burned beyond the keep's walls. Survivors hid in houses not theirs, thieves roamed the streets, and worse. New corpses decorated the walls of the inner city, and here, at the center of the palace, lay a paradise of spring blossoms.
Nyna lifted a hand to catch a blossom falling whole from its branch and ran into Camus when he stopped suddenly beneath the dome of the cherry tree. She stumbled a step back and felt his hand on her elbow, steadying her, heard his apology-- though she didn't acknowledge it. Instead she straightened and let the petal drop to the ground.
Several heartbeats passed before he withdrew his hand. "I am told your parents planted these trees on the day of your birth," Camus said.
She stared upward, the walls of her palace a dappled puzzle of gray and white through the flowering branches.
He looked away, half-shadow in her peripheral vision. "Eight for good fortune," he said, softly, "and one each year after to celebrate your health. Is that right?"
Her eyes grew warm. The pressure of tears gathered behind them, drowned the perfume of her blossoms and the dampness of the stone and earth plotted around them. She nodded-- then stopped herself before completing the motion, remembering who it was speaking to her. Their murderer should not share in such a precious memory.
The shadow grew darker as Camus approached. She turned her face away.
"More will be planted someday," Camus said. His hand again curved around her elbow, drew her back to the path. "Your hope does not end here."
Tears streaked down Nyna's cheeks Hope. Hope.
The walk back to her rooms passed in silence.
....................................................
Edit 10/30: Unless someone is dying to see more, I don't think I'll finish this series. It's not turning out well. Picking snips of moments here and there seems like a better idea.
Author: Amber Michelle
Day/Theme: 4 - So many breezes, but never enough
Gauntlet Theme: 14 - Hate me, hate yourself
Series: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon
Characters: Nyna, Camus
Rating: K
Words: 2482
Notes: for the record, I'm aware of the "myths" and "facts" surrounding apple seeds and cyanide. :p
..................................................................
Two knights of the Sable Order examined Nyna's chambers before she was allowed to return to them. Sharp objects were removed - the letter opener, a knife used to core an apple the afternoon before, though it seemed days ago, maybe a week; the remains of her food were removed (the pips contained poison, and what if she cracked enough of them between her teeth for their ambrosia?), the glass pitcher and basin were replaced with wooden twins, the scissors she used to trim her nails disappeared. She was allowed candles to light her way at night, polished wood for her plates and bowls, wood for her utensils. Objects light enough for her lift were removed so she might not break the windows, either for their glass or to attempt escape, and the balcony doors were boarded up from the outside. Camus, it seemed, knew almost as many methods of suicide as she did.
He did not allow a bath, but a female servant, Grustian by her accent, brought two buckets of water with which to wash her hair, and allowed her enough extra to fill the shallow wooden basin and sponge her skin clean. They'd left her oils and lotions, the rosewater in its slim crystal vial, but Nyna dressed quickly while her chaperon watched and left her hair loose against her back to dampen the cotton dress. She wore white - a simple high-collared dress and a bell-sleeved robe embroidered according to her rank, but otherwise unadorned. Her captor's gaze lingered on the stringy blanket of her hair soaking her back and commanded a servant outside to fetch a fresh towel and send another with firewood.
Nyna turned her face away from him and looked out the window. A small pleasure garden climbed the walls outside between the four wings of her palace; ivy tangled and clung to the stone and curled around the window moldings, moss caked the crevices and corners. Cherry trees spread their lacy pink boughs to make shallow domes over the greenery. She watched them shift in a breeze. It would be cool, fresh, like the slide of mint tea down one's throat and into an empty stomach.
Camus asked if she had been treated well, if she found fault with his servants-- beyond their allegiance, he said when Nyna told him she could do without his Grustian watch dogs ogling her every move. "Shall I assign you a companion, your highness?"
"That will not be necessary." She wished the chair were closer to her table to hide the clench of her fingers around the arms, but scooting across the floor would be noisy and undignified. "Stop troubling yourself on my account."
His lips parted for a reply that went unsaid when two servants entered, one of which Nyna recognized from the gardens, who bowed quickly and almost dropped her armload of firewood - small branches, mostly, sawed clean of sharp edges. They rattled against each other in her arms. Flint and tinder were drawn from a pouch on her belt. Her companion, the same girl who supervised Nyna's bath, approached without so much as a nod and draped her peach towel over the back of the chair to gather her hair.
"Your continued health is a matter of some import, unless you intend to abandon Archaneia." The maid pulled her hair when she took a quick breath to snap her reply, and he said, "My liege will come to his senses in time, and I would like you to be well and ready for that eventuality." Camus crossed the rug in four long strides that made the skirt of his long coat sway, the flare of the fabric leaving his shadow to stretch wide and dark across the room. He sat down in the opposite chair, adjusting his sword so it hung over the arm. "I'm told you have not eaten yet, today."
Nyna leaned forward, her fingers aching with the force in her grip on the chair arms, and felt the girl wrap a towel around her hair and squeeze. "I didn't give you permission to be seated in my presence, lord knight."
"With all due respect," he said, emulating her posture, leaning forward, "you are in no position to criticize."
"It's only a matter of time," she said, echoing her earlier thoughts. Nyna leaned back at the maid's insistent pull, felt her hands press the towel to her roots. "The eventuality you speak of will never come. I won't live on my knees, and I won't die bending my neck for the blade of a barbarian. Courtesy is a thin veil for what you really are, Camus the Sable. Take your assurances to the wall and parrot them to my parents-- they will care more."
He leaned back, and something curled in her chest when he refused to rise, instead nodding to the girl when she finished toweling Nyna's hair and sending her off with a gesture of his black-gloved hand. Her mother was the last person to sit in that chair. They'd sliced apples and cheese with short silver knives and arranged plates for each other, talking about the war and when it would surely end because, her mother said, Medeus was an old foe, a myth, unable to show himself outside of his castle. Surely he would raze their troops with his flaming breath if he were able, would he not?
To win a war, her mother said, repeating what they'd both heard from the king, cultivate a legend that will turn the tide of battle. The shadow dragon is just that-- a shadow. No-- the monster under Nyna's bed when she was four summers old and insisted her maids remain in her chamber with a lamp on all night.
It was all a nightmare, and she couldn't wake up.
She heard the fire kindle and snap. The orange glinted on Camus's fair hair, blushed the strands, the plane of his cheek, the muscle cording his neck above the high collar. "In two hours," he said, his tone still even and dispassionate, "I will be present to test your meal for poison. If necessary, I will feed you myself."
If eyes could have glinted like steel, she thought his would have stabbed her. Nyna wanted to slap the table and tell him to go to the fiery hell beneath Dolhr and take his charity with him. Instead, she said, "I will not dine with you."
"Nor I with you," Camus said, rising, bracing his hands on his knees. The chair creaked, the scabbard of his sword hit the legs. "It would be inappropriate." He spread his hand to the front of his coat and bowed. "Good day, princess."
He waited at the door for the servant to leave her station by the fireplace and scurry out ahead of him, and did not look back once before he pulled the door closed and faded from her senses, his footsteps a receding tap on the marble floor of the corridor. Nyna's hand trembled when she pushed hair from her face and gathered the length at the back of her neck in both hands. Pink petals drifted past her window and caught in the lead between the diamond panes, fluttering until another breeze pulled them away. The sun had passed her window, risen overhead, shining on filmy green and gray patterns below- the paths, the ivy, the manicured bushes.
The wood in her hearth burned faintly sweet while she combed her fingers through her hair and picked at tangles with her broken nails. It spread over her breast and fanned on her lap, dull beige and a hint of orange from the flames. Almost like her mother's hair, she thought, but not quite, not red enough, even in fire. Mud and gore had not dimmed it when Nyna saw it last, drifting on the air, tangled around rope--
If she never saw the color again, it would still remain in her memory as Archaneia's false dawn.
.
Her knight captor tasted her food as promised, perhaps to prove his good will, and Nyna allowed him to complete this duty in silence. He must realize - though he pretended ignorance so well - that she didn't care if his servants hid poison in her food-- that she waited, in fact, for the moment they would slip something past him, something Camus could not detect in time, or perhaps inured himself against as a measure of safety. He was no mere knight, but a general; he was no minor noble, but the son of an ancient Grustian House who maintained some political importance himself, if not much in the way of power. Grust was an isolated, mountainous land, and its politics were equally rough. She'd heard the farmers fought the soil every year for a harvest, and Archaneia's surplus harvest had fed the peasants for decades. No doubt they were eager for change.
And-- perhaps the same could be said for their king. What would he do if Camus was correct and he would allow her to live? Hold Archaneia hostage? Demand her hand in marriage? There had been talk of offering her to the crown prince, the king's brother; before that, there was discussion of handing her off to Michalis of Macedon, though her mother opposed it. She wouldn't see her daughter sent to a land where Dolhr's spawn speckled the sky like black stars-- and it was no use telling her wyverns weren't a strain of dark dragons. Let them be absorbed again by the darkness that bore them became her response to the proposal, and the matter was dropped.
It wouldn't have mattered. King Michalis, it was said, approached Dolhr willingly for an alliance. Nyna would have been given to the enemy, her death - or worse - assured.
She need only remind herself of that to recognize her fortune. In Archaneia, she had a captor who wished to preserve her life, whatever his purpose. If only her parents had been so lucky.
.
The former king and queen of Archaneia were released from their bondage two weeks after the fall of the city and embalmed, then wrapped in canvas, put into their caskets before Nyna was allowed to attend their remains for a proper burial. The lids were already nailed shut when she saw them into the family mausoleum, Camus's shadow enveloping her own as they marched through the steel-bound doors behind the funeral bearers. There was no service - only Nyna, with a prayer uttered in an unsteady voice, to lift Boah's ceremonial staff with its spell light and seal them away with a final formula in the old dialect.
Boah should have been there to do it, or Miloah, yet there was no sign of either. They would have met their ends on Grustian blades if not Dolhr's, it was certain, but Nyna hoped to be proven wrong.
Camus required her to return the staff to the keeping of his own clerics afterward, with assurances they were treating Archaneia's artifacts with respect and it would be returned to the vaults below the palace. Nyna asked after the crates and goods stored in her throne room the morning they met, and his returning remark - riches may be regained - left a sour taste in her mouth. She stared at a spot in his back that seemed to be centered between his shoulder blades, wondered if her glare might inspire him to shrug and wonder if an arrow were aimed for his back.
But naturally not; the palace was firmly in his grasp. The colors of the Sable Order, gold and black, were at every window and door, stationed at the beginning and end of every corridor. Camus's posture remained upright and stiff, as though he still wore his armor, and guards flanked the gate to the private garden so often seen from her windows. Others waited across the way, visible to Nyna through the foliage only because the golden decorations on their armor and surcoats glinted in the noon sunlight when they moved to and from the shaded steps.
The branches of her cherry trees undulated in the wind. Cool fingers of air caressed her face, tickled the back of her neck, and pulled the long tails of her hair from her back to drift. Pink and white petals littered the flagstone walk, flitted along the air currents while they drifted downward, tugged loose by the breeze.
Why did they not burn it? The object of Dolhr was surely to destroy Archaneia, not simply subjugate its commons. Her city lay half-burned beyond the keep's walls. Survivors hid in houses not theirs, thieves roamed the streets, and worse. New corpses decorated the walls of the inner city, and here, at the center of the palace, lay a paradise of spring blossoms.
Nyna lifted a hand to catch a blossom falling whole from its branch and ran into Camus when he stopped suddenly beneath the dome of the cherry tree. She stumbled a step back and felt his hand on her elbow, steadying her, heard his apology-- though she didn't acknowledge it. Instead she straightened and let the petal drop to the ground.
Several heartbeats passed before he withdrew his hand. "I am told your parents planted these trees on the day of your birth," Camus said.
She stared upward, the walls of her palace a dappled puzzle of gray and white through the flowering branches.
He looked away, half-shadow in her peripheral vision. "Eight for good fortune," he said, softly, "and one each year after to celebrate your health. Is that right?"
Her eyes grew warm. The pressure of tears gathered behind them, drowned the perfume of her blossoms and the dampness of the stone and earth plotted around them. She nodded-- then stopped herself before completing the motion, remembering who it was speaking to her. Their murderer should not share in such a precious memory.
The shadow grew darker as Camus approached. She turned her face away.
"More will be planted someday," Camus said. His hand again curved around her elbow, drew her back to the path. "Your hope does not end here."
Tears streaked down Nyna's cheeks Hope. Hope.
The walk back to her rooms passed in silence.
....................................................
Edit 10/30: Unless someone is dying to see more, I don't think I'll finish this series. It's not turning out well. Picking snips of moments here and there seems like a better idea.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-10-05 12:48 am (UTC)Murrph. I haven't read yet. I'm still vacillating. On one hand I haven't played the game, on the other, you did basically spoil me for their whole storyline. If push came to shove I could read the script. It's not like I haven't done that before.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-05 01:08 am (UTC)Yeah, I don't know. The script might be good enough, as all you'd be lacking are the pretty pictures. But it's up to you. It depends on how much playing the actual game adds to the experience for you when it comes to fic. For instance, I'm one of those people who can read a script, but not really feel the full emotional impact of something until I see it complete - with music, artwork, whatever.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-14 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-15 01:19 pm (UTC)I was thinking I might skip forward a bit and write fic unrelated, but on this general subject, instead. I didn't like the way this one was going, but there will be more, one way or another. I can't resist a tragic knight/princess pairing.
Thanks again for commenting~ <3