#FFXIVWrite2022 30 Day Challenge

[wordsworn]

Master post for all my entries into the FFXIVWrite challenge over on twitter/tumblr!

(Anything explicit or requiring cw: will be marked as such; everything else should be SFW.)



Prompt #1: Cross | ✧ Sizhu Jakkya (WoL) + G'raha Tia ✧ | ShB spoilers
[Just a snapshot of my wholesome catship LOL]

Prompt #2: Bolt | ✧ Sizhu Jakkya (WoL) + Emet-Selch + Hermes (+ mention of Hythlodaeus) ✧ | EW spoilers
[Total crack, written in an hour-long flurry of feverish writing, as usual if I don't feel super inspired by the prompt things get dumb, fight me, but it's still fun/funny to ME, CATTE IS CATTE, KNOCKING THINGS OFF TABLES, SIZHU GETS THE ZOOMIES LMAO, I might want to expand this one later idk LOL]

Prompt #3: Temper | ✧ Warrior of Light + Minfilia + Thancred ✧ | EARLY ARR spoilers and maybe hints at some other spoilers but nothing obvious unless you Know Things already
[What if Thancred hadn't been late to the fight when you faced down Ifrit for the first time? AU, written to make Phase scream. CW: Tempering, brief violence, implied impending major character death]

Prompt #4: Free Prompt - θάρρος (Thárros); Courage | ✧ Sizhu Jakkya (WoL) x G'raha Tia ✧ | Spoilers up through 6.1
[More wholesome catship; on her return from another trip to Aglaia, G'raha is taken by surprise at Sizhu's attire.]

Prompt #5: Cutting Corners | ✧ Hades + Hythlodaeus (implied Hades -> Azem) ✧ | EW spoilers
[After assisting Azem with saving that island and its grapes, Hades confronts Hythlodaeus about the indisputable part he'd played in the whole fiasco--but their conversation does not go at all the way Hades had planned.]

Prompt #6: Onerous | ✧ Mikh'a Jakkya (non-WoL adventurer, WoL's twin brother) ✧ | SB spoilers
[What happened to Sizhu's twin brother when she was snatched away to the First? Mikh'a tells of it in his own words.]

Prompt #7: Pawn | ✧ Emet-Selch (Hades) -> WoL (& Azem) ✧ | ShB spoilers
[Emet-Selch always plays the long game. Musings on chess pieces and the Warrior of Light.]

Prompt #8: Tepid | ✧ Cres Shatterheart (non-WoL adventurer) ✧ | ...no spoilers really? stuff from a minor sidequest is mentioned
[The reasons vary from person to person, but most adventurers are somewhat the same, deep down. No matter how arduous or tedious, sometimes the task itself is its own reward.]

Prompt #9: Yawn | ✧ Talys Shatterheart (WoL) ✧ | EW Spoilers
[In this timeline, the WoL is a f!Viera Sharlayan scholar with zero battle experience, who is doing a Forum-funded field study about adventurers for her thesis...and who is pulled into being Very Personally Involved in everything when she realizes two facts: 1) she's actually pretty badass at this fighting stuff, and 2) somehow, the whole world needs her.]

Prompt #10: Channel | ✧ Hermes -> f(Miqo'te)!WoL ✧ | EW SPOILERS ALL THE WAY DOWN
[He wants her, even though he knows that he should not. But she’s the only one he’s ever met who truly understands how he feels...and his emotions have always proven difficult for him to tame. Why should these sorts of feelings be any different? EW spoilers, takes place during the Elpis questline. CW: depression (it's Hermes), slight dom contemplations/mild sexuality (no actual sex tho)]

Prompt #11: Free Prompt - Embrace | ✧ Hermes -> f(Miqo'te)!WoL ✧ | EW SPOILERS FOR DAYS, YO
[I enjoyed that last drabble so much, I picked up right where that one left off and did another. c:]

Prompt #12: Miss the Boat | ✧ Sarhnai Dotharl + Koharu Sumeragi (WoLs) + Scions ✧ | EW spoilers OF COURSE
[FINALLY wrote some Dargon Girls AU! In which there are TWO WoLs who are both shards of Azem, who both ended up on the Source--soul-sisters, if you will. c: Koharu is mine and Sarhnai belongs to my friend, the wonderful incontrast. <3]

Prompt #13: Confluence | ✧ Sizhu Jakkya (WoL) + Ardbert ✧ | ShB Spoilers
[Phase gave me this idea, so these feels are her fault.]

Prompt #14: Attrition | ✧ Crystal Exarch (-> WoL) ✧ | Shadowbringers Spoilers LIKE WHOA man

Prompt #15: Row | ✧ Emet-Selch (Hades) + Azem (Persephone) ✧ | All The Endwalker Spoilers

Prompt #16: Deiform | ✧ Koharu (WoL) x Hien ✧ | EW role quest spoilers
[My soft dargon-girl has dokis for Hien pretty bad, and finds a way to show him a very small bit of just how badly. I still think it's kinda "eh" but Phase likes it, so it can't be terrible.]

Prompt #17: Novel | ✧ Koharu (WoL) x Hien (continued from previous prompt) ✧ | Spoilers for a Stormblood Dungeon, I Guess?
[Continued from the previous drabble, very short but my head is killing me, so. This will do. :c]

Prompt #18: Free Prompt - Fruit | ✧ Hermes -> f(Miqo'te)!WoL ✧ | Endwalker Spoilers OBVIOUSLY
[I wanted to keep writing more for that same Hermes idea...and it's a free prompt, so I did.]

Prompt #19: Turn a Blind Eye | ✧ Elidibus (Themis) + Azem ✧ | All The Spoilers, Especially for Pandæmonium
[Themis is concerned about Azem's censure, only to find that he needn't be. Pandæmonium spoilers, plus a hint of my own predictions about where that questline might go...]

Prompt #20: Anon | ✧ Aymeric x/+ unnamed F!WoL ✧ | ARR Spoilers, oh noes
[...Yeah, I hate this one. But, sucky prompt, sucky drabble. Only makes sense.]

Prompt #21: Solution | ✧ Talys Shatterheart (WoL) ✧ | No Spoilers, Lots of Anti-Garlean Feels

Prompt #22: Veracity | ✧ Sizhu Jakkya (WoL) + Emet-Selch (Hades) ✧ | ShB & EW Spoilers
[I don't much like this one either, but it's there.]

Prompt #23: Pitch | ✧ Fandaniel (+ hints of current one-sided and possible future-life Fandaniel/WoL) ✧ | Endwalker Spoilers FOREVER
[Get ready for a feels-punch, that is all]

Prompt #24: Vicissitudes | ✧ Thancred + Urianger + CATBABIES ✧ | No Spoilers, Just Headcanons
[This is really bad and really dumb, but these two catbabies are headcanon for me now...]

Prompt #25: Free Prompt - Halcyon | ✧ Hermes -> f(Miqo'te)!WoL ✧ | Endwalker Spoilers
[Con't from the previous free prompt~]

Prompt #26: Break A Leg | ✧ Koharu Sumeragi (WoL) + Sarhnai Dotharl (WoL) vs Zenos yae Galvus ✧ | SB spoilers
[COLLAB WITH PHASE \o/]

Prompt #27: Hail | ✧ Koharu Sumeragi (WoL) + Sarhnai Dotharl (WoL) ✧ | SB spoilers
[Con't from yesterday's. Koharu has a mad, and Zenos is 100% it.]

Prompt #28: Vainglory | ✧ Emet-Selch (Hades) i.e. "Solus zos Galvus" ✧ | All Spoilers, All The Time
[PHASE AND I PLAY CATCH WITH THE GARLEAN HATE BALL AGAIN. Uhhhh, I mean...Emet musings RE: building the stupid bull$h!t that is the Garlean Empire.]

Prompt #29: Fuse | ✧ Hythlodaeus (-> Azem) ✧ | Endwalker Spoilers
[Mehhhh this one is so unfocused...but oh well, it's done. Might revisit and turn it into something else later.]

Prompt #30: Sojourn | ✧ Sizhu Jakkya (WoL) + Venat ✧ | Endwalker Spoilers ;_;
[A good place to end. :c]

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Prompt #6: Onerous [con't]

[wordsworn]

“...What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“Just precisely that. Your sister, Sizhu Jakkya, Serpent Captain of the Order of the Twin Adder--otherwise widely known as the Warrior of Light--is gone.”

I blinked at them all for a moment, reading each of their faces in turn, then focused my attention on the Elder Seedseer.

“ ‘Gone,’ you say. Not dead, then?”

Her hands tightened on her staff, and her lips went thin--with worry, she was clearly concerned about my sister on a personal level, perhaps even thought of her as a friend--before she spoke. “We do not believe so, no.”

“There was no body, then.”


...Ah, perhaps I should have warned you that I can be very straightforward at times, almost to the point of abrasiveness. And perhaps far beyond it, at other times. Then was one of those times. I wanted the truth, plain and simple, with no games or nonsense. If they wouldn’t give that to me, I would demand it of them on my own terms.

“No,” the Elder Seedseer admitted quietly. “We found no body. She simply seems to have disappeared entirely.”

The rest of that conversation was a blur. I absorbed all the information, but I didn’t say anything more. They were searching for her, still combing the battlefield as well as sending agents into Garlemald, on the off chance she’d been captured. (Unlikely--as if any of those bastards could stand up to my sister.) There was a messenger enroute to Mor Dhona and the Scions’ headquarters there, to see if they’d had any news, and countless other avenues of inquiry were being pursued as well, but at that moment, they had no further intelligence to share. All they could do was offer me a linkpearl, with the promise of contacting me as soon as they heard anything.

But that wasn’t the only purpose of that meeting. If that had been all it was, again, a simple letter likely would have sufficed. But no. They wanted something from me. Something else other than my thoughts about where my sister might have gone. I could tell. I’m good at reading that sort of thing--I’ve dealt with it my whole life, so why wouldn’t I be--and I could read it in them there at that moment.

And with a little thought, it was obvious, really.

They wanted me to step into her role. To become their steadfast defender, someone they could all hide behind. A weapon they could point at their enemies, a protective charm whose simple existence could help keep the peace…out of fear, or something like it.

But I am not my sister. I do not possess her strength. Not in combat, or otherwise.

I cannot do this thing for them.


...Ah, but maybe I should tell you something they don’t know. I said before that my sister respected my choices enough to leave me alone, to let me live my own life, “most of the time”. I said that because there have been times that she’s come to me to ask for help. The time she stormed Castrum Meridianum, for example. A few other dungeons here and there. But after she was forced to flee to Ishgard after being accused of a crime she didn’t commit, she largely stopped doing that. She would still come to visit me (twice a month like clockwork, she knows I’m more comfortable with a steady routine), but she wouldn’t ask for my help. We had grown apart--and it had begun long before her exile to Coerthas. Perhaps it should have been obvious, but I hadn’t thought to put forth the effort to look for it, so I hadn’t noticed. But ever since she found so many of the Scions dead in the Waking Sands, she had kept things from me in a way that she never had before. Without me even knowing, she had held me at a careful distance--her way of protecting me, I know, and it’s easy to understand why. If I had been more involved, if we hadn’t followed our own paths, maybe I would have been one of the bodies she found in the Waking Sands.

“Maybe” doesn’t matter for much, though. It’s all projected possibilities of things that have already happened--and unless you find some manner of bending time to your very will, things that you cannot change. Nothing but another waste of time.


...Ah, you might remember that I said that I could not do what the Adders--indeed, likely all of the leaders of Eorzea--wanted me to do. And I meant it. Unlike my sister, a skilled all-rounder who can fill any role necessary, my own combat prowess is decidedly more limited. I prefer to stand back and observe, to cast from afar; any sort of rough-and-tumble melee-oriented combat, with the brunt of the force being directed my way, would certainly end with me on the ground in a heap.

Still, my refusal to fulfill that role was heavy on my mind as I wandered through Gridania afterwards, and I lay the blame for what followed on my distracted mind:

I accepted a quest from one of the God’s Quiver.

It was straightforward-sounding enough, something about bandits accosting travelers in the Twelveswood, and I told myself that had accepted the job because I was frustrated at my sister’s disappearance, that I simply wanted to work out my anger and aggression by unleashing it on those deserving of it, though part of me knew that was untrue. For I was angry, yes, but I was angry at myself most of all.


...Ah, I told you that she used to ask me for help. That she’d stopped doing it. That wasn’t entirely true. Really, she’d come to me again just days ago, before the battle in the Ghimlyt Dark, asking for my help once again at long last. Telling me of a deathless prince whose only thoughts were of combat and slaughter, of the measured but inexorable loss of her fellow Scions, of her concerns about what might happen here were she to be the next to succumb. Telling me that she didn’t want to ask, but she didn’t have anywhere left to turn. Telling me that it was time for me to take action. To put down knife and fork, and to fight for this world that we loved--at her side or on my own, in my own way, either was all right, so long as I acted. So long as I didn’t continue to sit idly by while the world burned.

I turned her down. I was angry, though I didn’t show it outwardly, and I’m more than certain she knew it. The words I leveled at her were nothing short of a slap in the face, and I had no call to say them--Sizhu is nothing like our mother, and has never wished for me to be what she wants. She did nothing but speak a heavy truth which she knew I did not want to hear, but that I still needed to, and I lashed out at her in return. I refused to aid her…perhaps when she needed it most.

Perhaps, had I been there, she might not have vanished.

But now, she’s gone. And I have no way of knowing if I’ll see her again. If I’ll be able to apologize. If I’ll be able to even attempt to make it up to her. I can’t take those words back, and I know she’ll carry their heavy memory for the rest of her life; and for further burdening a brave woman who already carries so much pain, so much grief, the weight of so many expectations...of that sin, I am undeniably guilty. And I must atone for my crime.

Which is why, when I found the bandits, and saved two travelers in the process, I accepted the offer one of them made to me. I have no interest in being a bodyguard, but…they do possess a set of skills of which I could certainly make use.

That way, if--when, I should like to say, but there is no place in these writings for baselessly hopeful conjecture--my sister returns to us some day, I can stand by her side, instead of allowing her to forge ahead alone.


...Ah, you likely don’t know it, but that’s how we used to be. Growing up, hunting together, we always watched each other’s backs.

A return to something like the harmony we shared during those simpler childhood days, a renewal of the trust that bound us together so tightly...yes. I should very much enjoy that...no matter how troublesome it might be.