reborn by fire

------------------

i. de profundis clamavi;

-----------------------------------------------

we looked for peace,

but no good came,
and for a time of health,
and behold: trouble!
...the whole land trembled at the sound
of the neighing of his strong ones;
for they have come
and have devoured the land,
and those that dwell therein.
--jeremiah 8:15-22

==============================

THE CARTENEAU FLATS, MOR DHONA - 1572, 6AE

==============================

||Hear||

She came awake with a wrenching gasp that was as painful as it was sudden.

Cramped limbs screamed in silent protest as they convulsed and slammed against the
sharp edges of what felt like a console. Trapped in a cocoon of carbonweave and
metal and cermet plating, she tried to cry out but all she could manage was a
hoarse and rasping groan.

Above the loud pounding of her heart she could hear a steady, metallic rattle: one
she finally recognized as the sound of water drumming against the husks of unmoving
warmachines. One of Mor Dhona's frequent heavy summer squalls must have blown in
over the lake. Otherwise-- there was only silence. Even the bright and frantic
wailing of the raid alarums from Castrum Novum had long since faded into memory.

The world had been consumed in fire and wrath, but for the nonce she was still in
it.

Everything seemed curiously vague: her memory seeming as muddy and opaque as the
dirty water trickling into the small crater that the reaper’s impact had left
behind. She remembered the awful sounds echoing from without the relative safety of
the VIIth Legion's infirmary pavilions, dead men and frightened screams and blood-
soaked aprons and issuing dose after dose after dose of potions and remedies and
combat enhancers.

There had been a call for teams to come retrieve wounded from the front lines after
the latest salvo-- that was how she had found herself in the thick of battle, but-

(she could vaguely recall the weight of her field kit as the strap cut into her
shoulder through the carbonweave of her uniform, stumbling over the dead and
carefully compartmentalizing the visceral horror of it as she tried to focus on her
objective. sudden surge of maelstrom forces from the flank, caught and separated
from her cohort amidst the skirmish, in a surge of scarlet so like and unlike her
own.)

(pillar falling from the sky threatening rumble overhead monstrous shriek of rage
and triumph fire and devastation when the moon split apart like a cracked egg and
then)

(nothing.)

What had happened while she had lain senseless? Time had clearly passed, a great
deal of it.

||Feel||

Pain lanced anew through her body, arcing across her temples like an aether current
and seeming to center itself in her third eye in a relentless throb, where it kept
unrelenting and awful pace with her heartbeat. Her hands, raised instinctively to
grasp her head, smacked uselessly against her helm. Painful spears of white light
danced in crystalline shards across her vision.

Not that damned voice again, not while she was awake-

||Hear. Feel. Think||

She waited for more, dreading more, but the voice was gone as soon as it had come.
After a few shaking breaths the visual artefact passed with it (the pain remained,
but she suspected that had more to do with the blood she could feel trickling from
her scalp). It took a few moments longer before she realized that she was in almost
total darkness save for a sliver of very dim light entering her space, visible
against the back of the upside-down chair.

She had to figure out a way to extricate herself or she was going to drown in a few
paltry ilms of contaminated sludge and rainwater.

After a moment's thought she wondered if she might be able to get some leverage by
bracing her feet against the back of the cockpit seat and pushing until she had
enough room to get free. Her legs were... not in good shape, but she couldn't
properly assess her condition curled into an uncomfortable ball in nearly complete
darkness, pinned and sinking into the mud by a few tonnes of scrap metal.

She took a deep and shaking breath and reached down, arranging her legs so that
both of them pressed against the back of the seat. Seven hells, this was going to
hurt. She hadn't broken a bone since she was nine years old, when she'd fallen out
of a zelkova tree trying to impress her best friend by showing him how high she
could climb, but she knew this pain well enough to recognize that the impact with
the reaper had fractured something, just... she couldn't tell what it was.

//Naught else to be done. Pain is temporary; death is permanent. Get on with it.//

She shifted her weight, braced her elbows in the mud, and pushed.

White-hot agony blossomed out of her hips and shot upwards, setting her nerves
alight. She groaned between clenched teeth, the sound muffled and deadened in the
darkness of her helm--and she also caught the creaking sound of shifting metal.
Something had moved.

//Again!//
Her gauntlets sank into the ground, water and thick mud pooling in around the
elbows, as she braced her feet against the console and shoved with all the force
she could muster. Tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes, trickling in warm
rivulets down her cheeks, as she kept throwing her weight against the wreckage over
and over as best she could manage, as little by little the gap of light grew wider.

She wasn't going to be able to move the reaper any significant distance, of course;
she had hardly expected that would be in any way feasible. However, she'd at least
made a space that she might be able to squeeze through with some work. Her hands
dug deep furrows into the earth, soft and loosened by rain and blood and leaking
ceruleum fuel, and over the course of the next bell she had dug a makeshift trench
she judged just deep enough for her to fit.

"All right," she muttered. "All right."

She rolled awkwardly onto her side, splashing into the mess that had pooled beneath
the unyielding metal of the seat.

Biting back a groan as the uneven landing jostled her hips, gloved hands grasped
the lacquered edge of the reaper's reinforced steel railing. They slid perilously
along the wet metal, water squelching out of the carbonweave, before she was able
to get enough of a grip.

There wasn't as much space as she'd hoped---the bridge of her helm only passed a
hairsbreadth beneath the railing; even a scant ilm of slippage into the mud while
she tried to move and her chest would be crushed beneath the weight of the bloody
thing, and that would finish her for sure. But there were no other options
available. All she could do was take the chance.

The nose bridge of her helm only passed a hairsbreadth beneath the railing and
jagged edges of metal snagged in her uniform at the shoulders, tearing at the
fabric and carving into the flesh beneath in hot, bright sparks of pain from
shoulder to elbow. But it was enough, just barely enough, for her to get clear. She
could deal with the superficial bleeding as soon as she was able to find a field
kit, and failing that- well.

She'd improvise.

She twisted her body to one side and dragged herself into the open, ignoring the
hot bolts of agony the movement brought with it when the flare of her hips cracked
against the edges of the console. Her nigh-useless legs trailed behind her, greaves
catching in the mud.

It all seemed to happen in such a torturously long space of time, though it must
have been only a brace of minutes.

She pistoned her feet weakly and pulled her dead weight along the sides of the
reaper until she could prop herself up against the lacquered hull in something
resembling a sitting position. She was soaking wet, filthy, and freezing, her left
arm was now torn open and bleeding, one and/or both legs were definitely not in
proper working order, and her head ached as though someone had bludgeoned her with
something very, very hard. But at least she would not die of exposure or drown in
tainted sludge while lying pinned underneath a dead warmachina, and she supposed
that was a victory in itself.

She was free, whatever that meant in this moment.

||Feel. Think||
She squinted into the sheets of falling rain, trying to figure out what she should
do. Through the thick smoke she could make out a few figures moving about the
field, but she didn't see anyone she recognized from her cohort. It occurred to her
that under the present circumstances, she should have found this fact worrisome. No
black-and-crimson meant no allies. No allies meant *you are behind enemy lines*.

But after everything that happened it was a struggle to care about such things. Did
it matter?

Had she ever really cared in the first place?

She stared at her gloved hands through her helm's tempered glass visor, trying to
force herself to feel nothing, to push past it. Her commanding officer had always
said that guilt on the battlefield was self-defeating but- all these months
traipsing about the Eorzean wilderness, losing people to local resistance fighters
and sickness from ambient aether and foul diseases and the local flora and fauna-

It had been, ultimately, pointless.

The sight of the broken and burnt bodies littering the field as far as she could
see had bestowed upon her a brutal sort of clarity: all this death and destruction
had been for naught save one man's hubris, and she was left awash in bitterness and
disgust at the futility of everything they'd done.

The godsdamned armor only made it worse. It made her feel too detached, too much of
a passive observer, to witness the horror around her through the relative safety of
magiteknical contrivance.

Angrily she started removing it, yanking at buckles and straps and metal clasps.
Gloves off, tassets off, gauntlets off: trembling fingers tearing at the buckles
and clasps and ceruleum insulation as she disposed of her armor piece by piece
until her hands ached and bled and the only remaining piece of armor she wore were
the greaves on her legs.

The helm was last. Once she had managed to pull the blasted thing free of the
myriad straps and wiring that seemed to bind it in place, she flung it through the
air and watched it disappear into the dark and the rain.

Almost immediately she was given cause to regret her recklessness. The scorching
burn of fire-aspected aether seared her lungs on her next inhalation even through
the chill of the wind, and the air smelled every bit as bad as she'd expected--
blood and sulfur and offal and death.

She coughed into the fabric of her sleeve and had just enough internal warning of
impending sickness to twist her upper body to one side before she retched into the
mud, overtaxed body convulsing from the spasms and fingers carving into the rain-
slick ground. It was there she remained for some time, stomach heaving until there
was nothing left.

When she pushed herself upright again she did so slowly and carefully.

It was getting harder and harder to keep her thoughts clear as the pain in her legs
became more and more immediate. Cold rainwater was steadily soaking into the black
carbonweave she wore, defying the liquid-resistant lining, straight through her
smallclothes and to the skin. Her hair stuck to her face and the back of her neck
in thick clumps, the golden braid pinned to her head stiff and tacky with rainwater
and dried dirt and blood.
She should find shelter. Somewhere.

If there was any to be found in this godsawful place. If she was able to move any
further---but she couldn't. Rescuing herself from beneath the husk of that metal
beast had sapped the last of her strength and there was naught left but pain and
exhaustion.

She slumped against the side of the reaper and shut her eyes, and let
unconsciousness claim her.