Noyel

☪ To The Moon, Apple of mine eye ☪

     Death.
          Too young for death.The boy was entirely too young to have to know death in all its facets, she thought, so she told him a lie: “We won’t be able to see each other again, soon.”One outstretched finger, gaunt and trembling, pointed weakly to the full and bright winter moon, two cormorants held within its luminescent eye. “I’m going—far away," she said. "But I’ll always be watching over you.” The boy knew it for a lie immediately, and she knew that he knew.“But-- mum, how'll I bring apples all the way up there?” he asked. Of course he still asked. The long spiral of a peel hung limply from where it met the knife. Errant light from the crepuscular haze bent around uneven panes of glass to catch and cast a small jewel in crimson, the first and last drop of blood from a tiny cut. A small finger strayed too far.“You’ll find a way,” she said. “I know you will.”

Apostate to Garlean exceptionalism
a pragmatic and practiced Dog of War through and through

Born Noyel aan Oszkar, attending the university of Medical Sciences in his administrative region of Garlemald was little more than a pipe dream. Gaining even the slimmest chance of admission, much less acquiring the sizeable endowments and government grants it would require to even hope to attend, was a privilege reserved for citizens.And so it was that this Garlean Hyur joined the VIIth Imperial Legion, his well-developed skills in literacy and administration from his time spent as an assistant scribe to a University hospital Notarius landing him a position as an Architectus, managing supply and logistics.The Battle of Carteneau was a baptism by fire beyond anyone's reckoning, and he was amongst the forces to dig in at Carteneau Flats after the fall of Nael van Darnus and face the Eorzean Alliance.Amongst the scarce few survivors remaining of the Garlean forces, most returned whence they'd come. Noyel, however, scrounged, poached, stole, and murdered his way down to Thanalan, just another refugee amongst a sea of many. At times fighting for bandits-turned-mercenary, the city-state of Ul'dah, or foreign companies, his life as a mercenary began when The Calamity wiped the slate clean.

Surcoats evoke the summer sky in their blues,
splashed with tumbling alabaster cumulus.
Their gilded celatas glittering, resplendent,
mark them out as well-funded and disciplined enough to maintain a shine.Yet for all that elegance in captivating colors lain across freshly polished arm harness and fine cotton coats, why is it that the faces that peer out from beneath those armored brims seem anything but?

Scar-marred faces decorated with habitually reset noses and ill-healed jaws promised violence with their paradoxically empty-and-at-once-focused stares that they might level upon any curious bystanders. These men and women are undeniably steeled, brutalist architecture covered in the thinnest veneer of tinsel and gilt.

Come on in and take a gander; pay no attention to mischievous slander.What is there to see but the flare of cannons in the moonlight, belching fire and brimstone in swirling ember hues, the glitter of runners by torchlight and the great flaming balls of fire they'd launch to set ablaze the storehouses and homes? The thundercrack of muskets, an antecedent to the flash that was itself just a precedent to one more missed shot that pinged off of the balustrades.

Much to lose. Even more to gain.

        A venerated Vizier
                                                  tumbling
                                         into
                                                      the
                                                                 valley,

Devils pushing the flanks,

And beneath it all like fervid undercurrents flowing to the distant sea no longer:

a dry and dusty river.