This was the least she could do.
SPOILERS FOR... The ARR MSQ, starting after the "Lord of Crags" and beyond.
CONTENT WARNING: Death, Body Horror
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She could smell the carriage before she saw it. It was parked inexplicably at the bottom of the Sunset Gate into the Bay, causing a cluster of congestion as folk crowded on the opposite side trying to go up and down in the same stretch of the ramp. Tsanuram tried to sit up tall enough in her saddle to see the hovering vehicle, spying the patched balloons wavering as bodies and birds pushed past.
A few volunteers stood beside it, locals from what Tsara could tell, masks over their nose and mouth for protection. They were apparently uninterested in the health of the townsfolk, though, but there wasn’t much Tsara could do about that other than fume. Closer, the futile attempts at absorbing the stench of the recently dead made a strange, unpleasant perfume: citronella, sweet onion, pepper and marigolds. It was all Tsara could do to hold her breath those last few fulms, lightheaded as she finally escaped the crowd.
Yulian was nervy from even before they’d reached Horizon, but he was bred for the battlefield and Tsara was able keep him soothed until she found space enough to dismount. She took the bird’s reins and petted his neck while they approached the portside.
“You have a whole spa day ahead of you, Yulik,” she said sweetly, though really she wanted to apologize for bringing him at all. “I promise. I swear.”
Tsara reached the steps and thought it best to tie Yulian off nearby. It was the smell here that clued her into why, exactly, the volunteers had their crude herse at the bottom of the Gate: it was one of the only places shielded from the sun.
When Tsara was twelve, there’d been a night raid near a local vein of the Nem. She could recall startling awake at the deafening sound of the Qestir’s wooden clappers, rousing the settlers in the pitch of night. Within a bell, eighty hands gathered to send their aid, horses and avians packed for swift travel.
“The Gate will stay shut until the danger of raiding passes,” her mother had said, gently tapping Tsara’s lacquered horns while her father bustled noisily to pack their draft mount. “You will be safe here while we are gone, as we will be safe among our friends.”
There’d been so little to do, those next few suns, with no tourists to entertain or bother for stories. Tsara caught up on her embroidery and her latest manuscripts, ate salted meat and milk and dates, re-ordered the cart a number of times. The whole time she’d lived in a state of self-important sullenness about being left behind while her parents ventured off with half the town.
When her parents returned, though, she realized there’d been nothing to be jealous of. Eighty hands had left and eighty hands returned, though Tsara later found that five of the townsfolk had stayed behind to tend the fires. The new five were the survivors, huddled beneath white blankets for protection against the sun, faceless in their silent grief.
And, of course, the smell. The stench of putrefaction and pyres clinging to fabric and hide, feathers and fur. Rotted meat, covered in half-smothered coals. It had been necessary to go as quickly as they had: even a single corpse could putrefy the streams the settlements depended on, killing fish and herds and, eventually, those in the city itself. The Wall could hold against savage beasts and bandits. It could not keep out a blight.
Tsara’s parents did not come into the yurt for a full week, living instead in a patchwork tent outside their stable, bathing themselves and their mounts in sour milk when they’d collected enough. They’d burned their clothes and, to Tsara’s horror, had cut their hair short and buried them at the edge of the Wall.
Never had Tsara seen her father so stoic, nor her mother so distracted. It had changed them, whatever they had seen there in the ruins of the settlement. They seemed recovered in a moon or so, but the shadow returned on occasion. The phantom cacophony of clappers at night, heralds of misfortune and horror.
Tsara thought she’d already seen horror enough in Eorzea while following along the Scions into a strange new destiny, becoming more than a book-vendor’s child within the moons she’d lived among them. Heartbreak, fear, exhilaration, and terrible truths of the world -- the thrill of learning new trades, new powers, trying new and wondrous things -- the girl who’d shared this with her friends was lost. She’d been left behind, her light growing fainter with each desperate bootstrike past frightened dock workers and on sandstone stairs, extinguished as she opened the doors to the darkened halls of the Waking Sands.
The old Tsanuram Kha had met the new between the moment between sight and understanding. The understanding came in a stomach-turning rush. It was not the smell of fresh death, of bile and bodily fluid before the flesh began to decay. It was the stillness. Here, beneath the bedrock, there was no breeze -- no sounds of chiming jewelry, of rustling fabric or parchment. There was only the echo of her heavy breathing, and then the noise of her knees hitting the floor.
She hadn’t screamed, though. She hadn’t even cried yet, save a few miserable, silent tears as she’d been jostled about by a few of the Flames, barely remembering the night after Noraxia’s final memory had bled into her memory. There’d been dust, the familiar sound of Yulian’s slight throat clicks as they reached the top of Drybone’s ramp to head to the Adama chapel.
It was the rage that had really woken her up: one of the Order dared to tell her that she needed closure. That she needed to walk among the bodies of her dead friend and pile them in the back of lopsided merchant carts like sacks of salt. Closure. She’d bit off something cruel, letting the words die in her mouth as she fought tears again. Barely remembering to mount Yulian, she’d stormed off to find a place to curl up for the night and forget.
Now she was here, because of course she had to be. There was no one else that had known these people as well as she had -- the other Scions were gone, or captured. It was just a few kind hearted souls and sanitation workers that were aiding them today, along with a few tired-eyed Flames. She saluted the guards briefly, and they did the same. The pity in their eyes was at least an understanding of what she was dealing with. The loss of comrades, and of no idea where to begin her mourning.
She’d worn an old black bilaud and a pair of oft-mended leggings, boots she’d long given up for the occasion gathering work. Gloves that had lost their enchantments. In her hair, a dried white blossom. It’d been a gift, something small to cheer her up from her heartbreak over her first crush. She couldn’t recall who had given it to her at the time, all of them crowded around her, patting her shoulders and her horns, handing her kerchiefs as she snuffled miserably into her tea as she told her sad, soppy tale.
That something so insignificant had reduced Tsara to a night of tears when she couldn’t even cry now was mortifying. But that was the old Tsara. The new Tsara had heard the Qestir’s clappers herself, waking from a nightmare into an uglier truth.
Closure or not, the sister had been right to send her back. This was the least she could do. It was the only thing she could do. So Tsara pulled up the scented rag she’d brought to cover her mouth, knelt on hot stone, and got to work.
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