After Minfilia's hundredth kill as the Oracle, Eulmore sets them both to task.

She
has bloodied her hands well by their account; she is a full-fledged soldier now,
like any other. Being ten years old is of limited concern -- not when her
predecessors have demonstrated equal lethality, and particularly not when they lose
ground daily to the eaters. Even with the Oracle's latest incarnation coming into
the full of her power, Norvrandt still loses more troops than there is time to
retrain.
They live in a time of perpetual crisis. Survival justifies these decisions.
Together, Ran'jit and his daughter take the field with the same single-mindedness
as hunting hounds, and for good reason: their enemies are always the same. Only the
scenery changes. As a specialist unit, they are sent alongside every contingent of
Eulmore's military, a weapon to be loaded and unloaded like any other piece of
equipment. Ran'jit teaches Minfilia how to ride both chocobos and amaros out of
practical necessity, keeping her perched on the saddle before him as she
tentatively clutches the reins; he helps her with pressure points against nausea
each time they are loaded onto the few airships which Eulmore dares to fling into
eater-infested skies, decks bristling with troops and longbows in hopes of
protection. They become bound to the road, bags perpetually waiting by their doors
so that they are always ready whenever the next call comes.
He becomes familiar with the weight of his daughter's pack, carrying it himself
more often than not as its straps tangle with his own -- so familiar that he can
tell just by picking it up if she has forgotten to bring enough clothes again,
blindly shoving replacement linens into the pockets even after she tossed her dirty
ones carelessly on the floor. The smell of stale sweat and leather layers them both
like a patina as they are shipped endlessly from front line to front line in a war
that never stops. The groaning of cart wheels are their ocean lullabies. They
scrape grime off their skin and tie their oily hair back in braids, bathing
whenever there is the rare luxury of safety for it. More than once, Ran'jit finds
his daughter's combs and hair ribbons jammed into the crevices of his own bag; her
used shirts become wadded balls mixed in with his own clothes, and Ran'jit sighs as
he throws it all in the washtub whenever they return home.
Minfilia -- Oracle-blessed -- performs far better than any hume her age, or even
twice that count over. At nearly thirty himself, Ran'jit bests his own peers with
equal mercilessness; neither one of them care to be average.
Yet she is still his little girl, as he is reminded whenever she oversleeps for the
morning roll call, or when she eats half his dinner along with her own, or when she
moans theatrically with a sore throat and will not stop until he brings her tea
with precious honey traded from the Crystarium, whose beehives remain on shaky
ground after the Flood. She is both too young and growing older too fast,
attempting to discover herself while surrounded by the expectations of countless
strangers -- and yet, Ran'jit cannot think of any better place to strengthen her
than here, in the heart of Norvrandt's greatest military, where she will at least
be safe.
The years bring them back to Eulmore gradually, allowing them to catch their breath
for the luxury of half a week at times -- an entire four days, where they can sleep
and wake with the strangeness of the same ceiling above them for longer than two
nights in a row. The liberty is dazzling. In those moments of respite, Ran'jit can
try to predict where they will be deployed next, and Minfilia can finally catch up
on her studies without having to balance a book on the back of an amaro.
They are both late for their evening training session when she broaches the demand
-- Minfilia from failing to complete her assigned coursework, Ran'jit from catching
up on the latest reports from the field -- so that even though they have ended up
working in his quarters, it is long past the time when either of them should have
headed down to the mats. Minfilia had commandeered his bed instead of a desk so
that she could finish her written assignments, spreading the books open haphazardly
across his thin mattress and using his pillow for a footrest. He had taken up
similar space over two tables, jamming them together in order to scrutinize an
enormously detailed map of Amh Araeng.
Dinner had already come and gone, plates delivered to his quarters as they had
absently picked through the meals, leaving a wreckage of fish bones and onions to
congeal on a side table. At this rate, they would both miss the best hours for
washup -- hot water at a premium still, even with the fire crystals they had traded
from the dwarves last summer to help bolster Eulmore's poor insulation -- and would
have to hope for whatever dredges remained.
He can tell when Minfilia has lost all patience for her labors, even before she
begins to kick restlessly against the bed in a heavy, insistent rhythm. "Must I
really finish this?" she asks, for the dozenth time. "It's not like anyone's going
to check it. We're scheduled to be on the road tomorrow ere the third bell. My
tutors certainly won't be there to criticize my score. Besides," she adds tartly,
"when will I ever meet an eater who demands I perform arithmetic for them?"
She has a point; Ran'jit cannot imagine what level of insanity such a situation
would require. "You need not become an expert, Minfilia." Straightening up, he
stretches both arms wide, feeling the ache in his shoulders from sitting hunched
over for too long. "But you must know enough to keep from being fooled by those who
are. A logistics officer may lie on their figures to cover up a mistake. An airship
captain may rattle off numbers claiming that an unlucky headwind will risk you
being caught by eaters, when in truth 'tis because they merely wish to sleep in
late the next morning. Or the error may be an innocent one, born of a single
misplaced number -- yet soldiers will still die because of it. Sin Eaters are not
our only dangers," he continues, glancing back down at the table and sliding
another map out, matching it up against a digsite near Twine. "Living people can be
even worse."
His daughter sighs, rolling onto her back and staring up mournfully at the ceiling
in surrender, murdering his pillow with her heels. Ran'jit eyes her doubtfully
before turning his attention back to his work -- but his own concentration is
completely ruined as well. Try as he might, the only thing he can see on the maps
are delays and boredoms, best suited for some distant point in the future that he
can consider later.
Before he can think of a decent excuse to call the night over, leaving the routes
to another day, Minfilia speaks up again.
"There's something I want to commemorate, Father," she states abruptly, with no
forewarning. Her hands are laced over her belly; her thumbs tap contemplatively
against each other. "Will you let me?"
Ran'jit glances up from staring disapprovingly at a chokepoint directly in the
middle of a new supply route; if he were a Sin Eater, he would surely strike there.
"Commemorate what? Being lazy? Skipping your language lessons?"
"No, Ran'jit," she says, rolling her eyes pointedly, as if he has just suggested
that the best way to kill a Forgiven Conceit is with a rock. "I slew my thousandth
eater while we were in Lakeland -- give or take a dozen. I'd like something to
remember it by. And then once more again, to note every hundred mark after. May I?"
He frowns. Not from disapproval; he'd thought she was at least two hundred short.
Suddenly bereft of enough time to plan, he fumbles for the few ideas he'd come up
with already. "Do you wish to learn a weapon style of some sort? Or refresh your
current armaments -- "
"A tattoo."
He cannot flip the bed entirely over -- his chair is in the wrong position to
provide enough leverage -- but his daughter shrieks when Ran'jit gets a foot on the
frame and shoves it up in a lurch, sliding her against the wall. The wooden legs
skid; Minfilia flings herself in a grab for the bedframe's edge to keep her own
weight from collapsing the furniture the rest of the way.
Ran'jit watches her with one eyebrow quirked before finally dropping his foot, and
allowing the bed to slam back onto the floor, hearing the crunch of some delicate
wooden strut now gone to the grave.
The pages of her classwork flutter haphazardly through the air, like leaves shaken
from a dying branch. Yet -- surprisingly, for all her disdain -- Minfilia spots one
and dives for it with a yelp, scrambling half-off the bed in frantic desperation,
stretching out an arm despite how badly it unbalances her.
He is faster -- but only barely, getting a toe on the paper and whisking it towards
him just as she makes a missed grab. He scoops it up with a curious frown, which
only deepens as he sees the monster scrawled upon the page. He has not seen its
like before. If it is a new kind of Forgiven, then he cannot imagine where it might
have come from. Derived from pixies, mayhap. Very unlucky ones.
"What madness is this," he asks calmly, reasonably, as if he has not just attempted
to fold up his daughter into the masonry.
She is undeterred, even as embarrassment colors her cheeks. "I would like a
tattoo," she repeats, as fierce and proud as he has unfortunately raised her to be.
"We've the artists for it here, in Eulmore. If the cost is of concern, I can seek
out marks like any other Clan hunter -- or, mayhap, some traders may need guarding.
I should suffice for that."
"My daughter will not fight for pay like a disposable mercenary," is Ran'jit's
automatic response, willfully ignoring the fact that the military keeps them on
stipend anyway. "And besides, you are only thirteen," he continues, which seems
like a very poor defense when the longest-lived Oracle was only two years older.
"It is far too soon to make that sort of decision."
Minfilia hauls herself up defiantly, her shoulders squared. "Weren't you even
younger when you got your first one, Father?"
Inwardly, Ran'jit curses himself for ever letting her glimpse the ink. "That was
different. It was necessary for summoning the power of Gukumatz," he protests. "Not
some winged eyeball. What beast is this? Does it even have a name? Why would you
want something like this upon your body?"
Yet his daughter goes curiously silent at the chance to further explain herself,
directing her stare back towards the page in Ran'jit's grip even as her hands open
and close in clear ambition: willing to try and snatch her treasure back, even when
he is already on his guard.
He exhales with a groan, and then finally shoves himself out of his chair, feeling
the lateness of the hour turning his muscles stale. "You are too big for me to pick
up by your ankles anymore, Minfilia," he tells her sternly -- and does it anyway,
tipping her upside-down as she shrieks in mock indignation and nearly breaks his
nose with her heel.
He dumps her back on the mattress, where her restored smile can meet a faceful of
papers. "Keep studying, girl," he warns. "The eaters may not care about your
ability to perform arithmetic, but our soldiers will live and die by how many
weapons come to their hands, and how much food and medicine we can transport to
them. But that's enough labor for the both of us today. Come, and let's test if
you're still too slow on that kick I showed you last week. If you plan to use it on
the eaters tomorrow, you'll have to at least learn how to bruise me with it first."
She doesn't give up, however. With a stubbornness that he is equally guilty of
having taught her, Miniflia refuses to let herself become distracted by any number
of practical matters, such as mastering a new strike for shattering someone's
clavicle. She draws winged circles idly in the sands of Cracked Shell Beach, and
steals an inkwell to squiggle dots on the back of her arm. After they return from a
successful campaign routing the eaters back through the Duergar Mountains, Ran'jit
sees her scribbling the first monster again outright instead of working on her
histories, shoving the paper guiltily under her books once she spots him glancing
in her direction.
He addresses the matter before it can continue to foment rebellion, tossing the
laundry he had been folding right back into the basket with the rest. "What drives
you to remain so attached to that thing, Minfilia? I would have remembered fighting
such a beast. It cannot have been an eater you have faced, let alone your
thousandth mark."
Minfilia's eyes dart back down to where she had hidden the page, as if debating if
she can still deny the whole matter altogether. Finally, she pulls her resolve
firm. "Do you remember when I had trouble sleeping last year, Father? I had those
awful dreams about monsters chasing me endlessly through Eulmore, up and down the
stairs, squeezing through the halls like rubber. Goobbues, but horrible ones,
crushing everything beneath them. Glowing eyes everywhere, with thousands of teeth.
They were terrifying."
"I remember." Ran'jit's brow knits as he thinks back to the summer before; the
nightmares had arrived and vanished with little explanation. Normal childhood
terrors, others had advised him. Nothing more. "I assumed it was from too much
training out by the Bright Cliff, fighting maultasches."
His daughter nods gamely, though her mouth is still pinched into a wavering line,
tight at the corners in a distress she cannot entirely conceal. "One night, I
dreamed there was a light down one of the halls -- not like the sky at all, but
softer somehow. Kinder. When I ran to it, there was a woman there. She looked like
me, but older." Timidness has never been a frequent visitor to Minfilia's face; it
reigns there now, fumbling all her words for her like a neophyte dropping all of
their knives upon the floor. "When she patted me on the head, I felt safe. There
was this... warmth, and then it seemed as if I wasn't in Eulmore at all anymore,
but some other city, one I've never seen before. There were flashes of other
things, banners and people and clothes, all with different marks on them. Like that
one."
She bites her lip, pausing long enough that Ran'jit's sense of alarm prickles.
There is a twist beginning in her voice, like a spring being wound tighter and
tighter with each syllable, until its inevitable snap.
"After that, the bad dreams began to fade, until they just stopped one day. I think
maybe... that it was the Oracle of Light that I saw. The first Minfilia. The real
one."
The tale is enough to leave Ran'jit silent. It is understandable that his daughter
wonders about her history. The first Oracle is to her what Ran'jit's lost homeland
is to him -- a myth, a story, the full truth known only to the dead. All he knows
of his heritage is himself and his father, and the empty nights alone as he waited
for his father's patrols to end, trying to prepare food with what they had in their
quarters and teaching himself ways to occupy the silence. He never became fluent in
what should have been his first tongue, and even now Ran'jit forgets what little he
learned. It is a language only given to his ghosts, voiced in his thoughts where
the pronunciations grow softer and slurred with each year: uchi, hashi, haha.
Yet the stamps of their inheritances remain undeniably upon them both, marking the
ways in which Norvrandt forever perceives them. Their names. Their faces, belonging
to people they never knew. Their eyes. The ways in which they fight. Legacies they
each belong to, which can never be claimed in full.
It is a curse which is even heavier upon his daughter. However her current
incarnation will be remembered in history, it will be merely as a placeholder,
validated solely for her ability to be the Oracle -- and worthless otherwise.
And, in Eulmore's books, an Oracle who ever decided to give up the fight was no
Oracle at all.
Ran'jit hesitates, and then plunges ahead. "Do you feel judged against her?"
His daughter's head jerks up sharply, as if startled that he could identify the
cause, let alone cut straight to it. Then she firms her jaw, and nods. "By
everyone. Even you wonder, don't you, Father? If I'm as good as she was." Taking a
breath, Minfilia meets his bluntness with her own. "Or if I'm a poor reincarnation
of the Oracle this time, born weak, and Eulmore should just hurry up and get a new
one because I can't -- I can't fly, or turn Sin Eaters into crystal with a wave of
my hand, or anything else the real Minfilia must have been capable of. That maybe
I'm not," she falters, showing her teeth in a grimace as she struggles through the
shame boiling through her -- only to fail and drop her gaze back to the floor. "I'm
not Minfilia enough."
He will not do her the disservice of lying. He has thought about her performance --
but only because it has been shoved in his face every day, along with measurements
and accounts of the Oracle's first two reincarnations. Every senior officer wishes
an account of how her current growth is charted. How many eaters she has slain. How
many more she can be counted on to kill, and if she will need additional support in
the field, lest their ranks die if she cannot hold the line. They are the coldest
of statistics, valued by those who have never seen his daughter cry, let alone
bleed.
And yet all those explanations -- all those justifications -- will mean nothing to
a child hoping for an absolute yes or no, and knowing it will never come.
"Minfilia," he says, which is a mistake when he sees her shoulders hunch, tense
with misery.
But there is no better name he can give her that would not be equally cruel. Not
with all the expectations shoved upon her by the whole of Norvrandt, the ones they
will not allow her to forget with each fresh demand for help. So long as the Oracle
remains the sole beacon of hope for their world, his daughter can never escape the
burden of lives being shackled around her throat.
Instead, Ran'jit shoves the laundry basket aside, striding over to where Minfilia
sits, huddled and despairing with her hands tucked into tight fists on her lap. She
is too tall for him to kneel, and too short for him to hold easily like this -- but
he does his best as he wraps an arm around her shoulders anyway, stroking her hair
just like he had every time she had woken from those selfsame dreams, shuddering
with a fear that neither of them could understand.
"You are real enough for me," he says quietly. "I will hear no soul claim
otherwise."
Then -- before sentimentality can further betray him -- Ran'jit hefts her up
suddenly out of her chair, swinging her around in a wide circle that nearly knocks
over a desk. "Very well, misbegotten child," he relents, setting Minfilia down
carefully upon her bed. "Next year, we will have your tattoo done. But no sooner,"
he adds, holding up a finger to forestall her latest protest. "We still have the
summer months to get through, and those are always the worst with all the farmers
out in their fields. We must guard them 'til the harvests are over, or else Eulmore
and its neighbors will starve. Too, there are troubling spots of eater activity in
Amh Araeng, judging from these reports. We will have the work done after winter,
once the weather begins to warm. The fiends are always at their most sluggish then,
and we wouldn't want an injury to interfere with your healing. Do I have your
agreement?"
"Next year!" Having a chance to complain again rallies her; emboldened by
contrariness, Minfilia scowls. "I'll be ancient then, Father. My skin will be too
wrinkled for the ink."
He flips a blanket over her head to smother her, and she squeals in muffled outrage
-- but he can tell that she's pleased once she finally gets her head free again,
snuggling deeper in the covers with a little squirm of delight that she's never
outgrown since childhood.
"You should get one with me, Father," she suggests next, before he can steer her
thoughts away from further temptation. "And then each time I add to my trophies,
you could too. We could celebrate together that way."
He's prepared to protest for this, as well -- but strangely, the idea is less
objectionable than he expected. "If so, then I should not wear your Oracle's
crest," he points out. "That belongs to you alone, child. I have no such powers
against the Light."
Minfilia makes a thoughtful, drawn-out hum, tilting her head as she studies him.
"I'll think of something else by then," she insists, and slaps her hands down on
the covers, demanding his full attention once more. "You promise? Once winter is
through?"
"Only if you don't choose something ridiculous for me to wear, girl," Ran'jit
warns, envisioning caricatures of goggle-eyed gigantenders posing ludicrously in
processions down his forearm. "Now, get some rest."
She laughs and doesn't answer -- only nestling herself back down against her pillow
-- and he tugs the blankets properly over her feet, and bids her good night.
By the time the next year finally arrives, his daughter is already gone.
He finds the sketch when he is cleaning out his travel pack that summer, emptying
it down to the barest threads in preparation for replacing it; the claws of a
smilodon had shredded it nearly in half. Eulmore has him traveling all across
Norvrandt again, fighting on every battlefront from Scree to the Citia Swamps. The
Oracle may be lost for now, but they still have a use for him.
The study journal is wedged in one of the side pockets, so deeply flattened along
the seam that he'd missed it in all the careless moons he'd spent automatically
filling his pack and emptying it again. His daughter's handwriting slopes across
the leather cover. He dislodges it carefully, its spine soft and broken from rough
handling, the pages stained from meals and mud and rain.
He does not expect the surge of memories to hit him as keenly as it does, simply
from touching the book -- but they rise up regardless, swift enough that they choke
his throat and strangle him from within, as if every one of his daughter's smiles
has been turned into a stone filling his lungs, every one of her laughs into a nail
being hammered into his ribs. He is not ready for them. He will never be ready. All
he can do is to stop and shudder in place, his eyes too full of sorrow to see.
When Ran'jit finally manages to crack the journal open, half of a flower slides out
and drops towards the ground.
He catches it on reflex alone, feeling the ruined plant crackle between his
fingers. The blossom is in poor shape. It had not been dried properly, squashed
between pages to try and absorb the moisture rather than allow the air to dehydrate
it. Its remaining petals are crumpled, browning with age and damage. The drawing
itself is crude, amateurish, but he can tell what it is intended to look like: a
flower at the height of its bloom with two arcs of leaves flanking it, left open at
the base. In the corner of the page, there is a second, smaller sketch, with more
flowers added beneath: one for every malmstone that Minfilia would have passed,
like a chain of ivy fountaining down Ran'jit's skin, marking him in parallel as
Minfilia would have -- should have -- been.
He touches the words written haphazardly at the bottom of the page, and then seeks
out the artists on the lower floors.
His skin has already been heavily touched by needle and ink, his back and arms
covered with the intricate stamp of Gukumatz's claim upon him. The spell is part of
his body; the dragon paints him with its own colors. Crimson and onyx scales dance
in swirling currents along Ran'jit's shoulderblades. Its tail curls in spirals
across his spine. Talons fan along his pectoral muscles, speckling him like thorns.
But there are spaces left yet untouched by Gukumatz. Ran'jit's belly, his legs, the
rest of his skin. The radius around his heart. The bone of his sternum plates over
the spot like armor, refusing to break. He has never taken a scar across it; no Sin
Eater has ever come close.
It is a fitting choice of placement. He will carry the tally for them both there
now: a new record not of his daughter's victories, but of their losses together.
He claps his hand upon his chest when asked for the location, and sits down without
hesitation. The tattooist considers the choice, and gives him a shrewd frown. "The
bone is closest to the skin there," she warns. "It will hurt."
"It already has," is Ran'jit's clipped reply.
Taking the cue, the artist simply nods, and picks up the journal page for study.
"And you wish for it to look exactly like this sketch, with no cleanup? This, I can
deliver. A flower, correct?"
Ran'jit leans back to wait for the preparations, staring up at the stonework of the
ceiling as he remembers the label scrawled beneath Minfilia's sketch.
"For my daughter," he says. "A wild rose."